Existentialism's topics - tribe.net

NO EXIT on stage in San Francisco

2009-07-28T07:13:21Z

www.noexitonstage.com

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New Moderator?

2009-07-23T05:51:06Z

Our moderator appears to be MIA. Shall we pick a new one? I'll throw my hat in the ring...

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Phenomenology

2009-02-28T17:37:33Z

I'm currently reading Camus' <i>Myth of Sisyphus</i>.

<b>Phenomenolgy</b>

I managed to explain phenomenology (I think) by analogy with a game of pool.

The balls are arranged on the table more or less randomly but there are rules governing how you must proceed so the random arrangement of balls on the table constitutes an instrumental complex. The randomness has order imposed upon it by the rules of the game.

Your consciousness as a player transcends the balls and the table and your body becomes an instrument, an intentional object, that exists in relation to the balls, cue, pockets and cushions.

There are rules, your shot must begin by hitting the white and then procedd to hit another ball, ideally you will pot a ball of your own colour and not the white or the black, else leave the opponent with nothing to aim for or hit of their own colour.

So there's a hierarchy of intentional objects, your consciousness analyses the position of the balls, pockets, etcetera as an instrumental complex then places your body and the cue in a position relative to the white ball and the desired outcome of your shot.

After your game you learn to see again, you are no longer playing pool you are now a person moving about and you see the world through a new perspective, which you will tend to do without reflecting upon your change of attitude, just as you don't really reflect greatly upon the change of attitude to that of a person who plays pool.

Basically the self transcends itself but in so doing does not generally grasp the minutae of its intentions. These intentions all exist in a kind of complex that's keyed towards such-and-such an end.

MYTH OF SISYPHUS
================

I haven't finished yet, I'm on page 44 of the Penguin Englsh translation, at this point Camus seems to be dropping his first "bombshell". Taking the view of phenomenolgy I attempted to explain by the pool game example, Camus seems to be saying that life is pretty much random and that we impose order fairly arbitrarily with our intentions, some of which are of the Other and some of which are of the Self.

In my view phenomenology treats the Self as a kind of "privaleged Other", in that we have first hand perceptions of underlying motives and thoughts, rather than having to infer them from third hand perceptions, but the Self is an Other is the sense that in the act of grasping ourselves we (unintentionally) "flee" that perception and the Self, that we van never fully transcend our Self because the act of setting up the Self as an intentional ibject is "contaminated" by the perspective from which we try to grasp it (first person by proxy, to put it in some hazy kind of language).

We may rationalise our perceived failings, over-romanticise our motives, our successes or simply be blind to our abilities where we have them, assuming, say, everyone else possesses them too. We may flee our "shame".

[ As Nietzsche put it, in Thus spoke zarathustra, "I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour and who then asks: Am I then a cheat?—for he wants to perish." ]

Here I'm using an alaysis of the Self that I find in Sartre's Being & Nothingness, The Existence of Others, which I think isn't a million miles away from where Camus is at as regards the Self. Camus is certainly working within a similar framework legacy to Sartre.

so, Camus seems to be saying that the world of any Self is not much more than an arbitrary random set of perceptions given order by a transcendent consciousness. This consciousness may conclude that this world is all meaningless and painful, that it is no longer longer worth struggling with. At this point the Self confronts nihilism head on and may be tempted to cease playing pool altogether, concluding, say, that they will never be any good at the game.

Camus confronts this situation but makes the philosophical leap that resistence is meaningful in-itself and that to resist with passion is essence of life. You may be doomed to lose one particular game of pool, that's a possibility, perhaps a certainty in the "meta-game" of life, but there are individual "games" (events) to be struggled over, there's perhaps a certain nobility that can be salvaged in defeat so (philosophical) suicide is not really an option.

As I wrote, I've only read to page 44 and I'm infering a bit perhaps, or my interpretation may just be plain wrong. any comments welcome.

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Respond to content, rather than calling authors names, Mickey

2008-12-12T15:56:35Z

Respond to content, rather than calling authors names, Mickey

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EXISTENTIAL LIFE REVIEW (Part 1) an online e-course for you

2008-12-12T15:55:21Z

EXISTENTIAL LIFE REVIEW (Part 1) an online e-course for you
Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

COURSE DESCRIPTION

In this course, you reflect upon your being-in-the-world in terms of the subjective/objective and universal/individual continua (bipolar personality theory) and in terms of field theory, your center, and the hierarchy of levels of consciousness derived from phenomenological reduction. Understand and personalize the existential ideals derived from field theory and reflection:
constitution
responsibility
self-disclosurer
negation
anxiety and pain
finitude
non-being and death
reflection and epoche
inwardness, subjectivity and self-reliance
uniqueness and individuality
eternity and unity consciousness
freedom and guilt
affirmation of life
commitment and cathexis,
reality
encounter and love
flexibility and adaptability
the flowing existential moment and futurity
growth and self-transcendence
polarity, dialectic and contradiction.

I encourage you to collaborate with other students–just note such sharing. Adapt the exercises and experiments to your particular circumstances. Create parallel experiences, where appropriate. If you lack a partner on any exercise calling for one, you may play the role of your own partner, creating a fantasy dialogue.

Respond, mentally, to a partner aloud, by email to this site or as a formal tutorial with Dr. Lessin, to all starred (*) questions, such as the one below.

DEFINE EXISTENTIAL-PHENOMENOLOGICAL

* In Existential-Phenomenological Psychchology, you .... (select correct alternatives.) Answer the question below intuitively, then I’ll let you know what I think.

a. Take yourself and others as you exist--living, acting, feeling, thinking phenomenon, at this moment in an organic relationship with each other;

b. Appreciate the shifting constellations of meanings constituting your and others' bodily experienced reality;
c. Contact phenomena as you live them out and experience them;

d. Focus on people in their concrete, meaningful, everyday life experiences;

e. Recognize the interdependence between your lived-body, the space around you, your actions, your experiences and the organization of your personal world;

f. Find the meaning of life in your own limited and finite life on earth;

g. Study the embodied human being in his or her world;

h. Take into equal and simultaneous consideration (for you and all humanity) yourself what you relate to, and how you and your objects relate;

i. Explicate the essence, form and structure of human experience and behavior through disciplined reflection and descriptive techniques;

j. Simultaneously ask yourself, "Who am 1? and What kind of world do I live in? as inseparably bound aspects of your unified personality, body and environment.

Answer: All are correct.

Peter Koestenbaum organizes existential-phenomenological findings into propositions or ideals. [Koestenbaum, P.The New Image of the Person: 1974, pages 39--45.] When you live these ideals, he writes, your existence is authentic, compassionate, happy and meaningful. Examine your own and your clients' knowledge and existence, Koestenbaum suggests, in light of these ideals. He provides reflective devices, which I augment for you, to personalize the following ideals.

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS. leading to further growth.
****

Preparatory Exercise for Confluent Understanding and Retention of the Existential Ideals

Read each of the existential ideals (jbelow) aloud three times in the first person singular (“I”) using the present tense. As you read each, rephrase it (with no further study) in your own words.

I consciously experience the reciprocal interplay between myself and what I experience as I understand and intentionally live with existential field theory.

I experience myself at several levels of consciousness.

I am responsible for choosing my attitudes and reactions.

I consciously experience my ever-developing sense of myself as an individual and an illuminatory channel for humanity and higher unity; I tell myself the truth about myself as I come to know it.

I value my pain and anxiety as my opportunities to learn.

I use my limits to make my life meaningful; I use the fact of my inevitable physical death to vitalize my life.

I both live and reflect on my life.

I am independent, self-reliant and subjective as a balance to my love and commitment.

I am a unique, creative individual.

I revere the consciousness that flows through me and others.

I freely choose my values and accept healthy guilt so I can choose-better.

I cherish and affirm my existence; I say "Yes" to life.,"

I commit myself to people, principles, goals and a lifestyle.

I am realistic. I authentically encounter and love others. I am flexible and adaptable.

I experience my life at this very moment; I am one in this moment with what I have learned in the past as well as my hopes for the future.

I am continually growing and expanding what I consider myself to be.

I welcome contradictions, opposites, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish MY broader understandings and growth.

****
* Select one or more of the three alternatives below:

a. I read each ideal aloud three times;

b. I rephrased the ideals in (some, most, all - (circle one)) cases;

c. I didn’t read them aloud thrice nor put them into my own words.

* Put a copy of the 19 existential ideals (written in the first-person) on your bathroom mirror and read them aloud every morning, upon arising, until you have completed all the homework for this class.

* Memorize the ideals; recite them daily for the rest of your life, modifying, deleting and adding to them as you do.
**** (to be continued)

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals, proceed to an ideal-by-ideal exploration of the existential model of being in the lessons I post.

With Aloha,
Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

posted in Existentialism - 4 replies

Existential Review Part 22, REFERENCES, Parts 1-22 - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

2008-12-10T19:33:51Z

Existential Review Part 22, REFERENCES, Parts 1-22 - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

REFERENCES

Assagioli, R., Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques, New York: Penguin, 1976.

Campbell, J., The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Cleveland: Meridian, 1956.
Corey, G., Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy, Second Edition, Monterey: Brooks/Cole, 1982.
Cornucopia, R., The Method Works If You Do, St. Mary: Cornucopia, 1980.
Corrierre, R., and Hart, J., Psychological Fitness, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979.
Fagen, J., Shepherd, I., Editors, Gestalt Therapy Now, New York: Harper, 1970.
Feder, B., Ronall, R., Editors, Beyond the Hot Seat, New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1980.
Ferguson, M., The Aquarian Conspiracy, Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1980.
Firman, J. and Vargiu, J., "Dimensions of Growth" in Synthesis 3-4, San Francisco: Psychosynthesis Institute, 1977.
Frankl, V., The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, New York: Vintage, 1973.
Hampden-Turner, C., Radical Man, London: Duckworth, 1981.
Hampden-Turner, C., Maps of the Mind, New York: MacMillan, 1981.

Huxley, L., You Are Not the Target, New York: Pnon, 1963.
Huxley, L. You Are Not The Target NY: Avon, 1963.

Kaufmann, W., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sarte, New York: Meridian, 1975.
Keen, E., Three Faces of Being: Toward an Existential Clinical Philosophy, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970.
Kelly, A., "Evaluating and Improving Family Health" in The Holistic Health Handbook, Bauman, E., Brint, A., Piper, L., Wright, P., editors, Berkeley: And/Or Press, 1978.
Keyes, K., Handbook to Higher Consciousness, 5th Edition, California: Living Love, 1979.
Keyes, K., A Conscious Person’s Guide to Relationships, Kentucky: Living Love, 1979.
Koestenbaum, P., Managing Anxiety, the Power of Knowing Who You Are Englewood Cliffs: Spectrum, 1974.

Koestenbaum, P., Existential Sexuality: Choosing to Love, Englewood Cliffs Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.

Laing, R., The Divided Self, Maryland: Penguin, 1965.

Maddy, S., Personality Theories, 3rd Edition, Honewood: Dorsey, 1976.

Maslow, A., Motivation and Personality, 2nd Edition, New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

Mathes, E., et al., "Peak Experience Tendencies: Scale Development and Theory Testing," Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 22, No. 3, Summer, 1982.

May, R., Angel, E., Ellenberger, H., Existence, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958.

May, R., Existential Psychology, Second Edition, New York: Random House, 1960.

May, R., Love and Will, New York: Norton, 1969.

Perls, F., Hefferline, R. and Goodman, P., Gestalt Therapy, New York: Bantam, 1977.

Perls, F., Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, New York: Bantam, 1969.

Perls, F., In and Out of the Garbage Pail, California: Real People Press, 1969.

Perls, F., The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy, California: Science and Behavior Books, 1973.

Polkinghouse, D., "Phenomenological Psychology" in The Psychotherapy Handbook, Herink, R., editor, New York: Meridian, 1980.
Polster, E. and Polster, M., Gestalt Therapy Integrated, New York: Vintage, 1973.
Progoff, I., At a Journal Workshop, New York: Dialogue House, 1980.

Rowen, J., Ordinary Ecstasy, London: Routledge & Kegal Paul 1976.

Schiffman, M., Gestalt Self-Therapy, Menlo Park: Self-Therapy Press, 1971.

Speck, R., Atteneaue, C., Family Networks, New York: Pantheon, 1973.

Shostrom, E.,. Actualizing Therapy, San Diego: Edits, 1976.

Speck, R., "Social Network Intervention" in The Psychotherapy Handbook, Herink, R., editor, New York: Meridian, 1980.

Smith, E., The Growing Edge of Gestalt Therapy, New York: Brunner Mazel, 1976. Stevens, J., Awareness, New York: Bantam, 1971.

Stevens, J., Gestalt Is, Moab, Utah: Real Pe-ople Press, 1975.

Stevens, J., "Gestalt Therapy" in The Psychotherapy Handbook, Herink, R., editor, New York: Meridian, 1980.

Valle, R., King, M., Existential-Phenomenological Alternatives for Psychology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Vargiu, J., "Psychosynthesis Workbook," Synthesis, Vol. 1, 1974.
Wilber, K., The Spectrum of Consciousness, Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977.
Wilber, K., The Atman Project, Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing, 1980.

Wilber, K., No Boundary, Boulder: Shambala, 1981.
Wilber, K., The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science, Boulder: Shambala, 1982.
Yalom, I., Existential Psychotherapy, New York: Basic Books, 1980.

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Existential Review Part 22, USE CONTRADICTIONS, POLARITIES, PARADOXES & AMBIGUITIES - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

2008-12-10T19:24:54Z

Existential Review Part 22, USE CONTRADICTIONS, POLARITIES, PARADOXES & AMBIGUITIES - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first 4 lessons,
continue the exploration of the existential model with Ideal 5. Share your reactions to the existential explorations and let others benefit from your explorations.

USE CONTRADICTIONS, POLARITIES, PARADOXES AND AMBIGUITIES TO ESTABLISH DIALOGUES LEADING TO FURTHER GROWTH (Ideal 19)
When you live by this ideal, Koestenbaum indicates, you say to yourself, "When faced with contradictions in life I am challenged. I realize that values and situations are usually ambiguous and unclear. There are many sides to most issues. I feel no compulsion to discover always and absolute right. I can act in spite of uncertainty. I can make decisions in spite of ambiguities. I can make commitments without being certain of the truth. I can tolerate disagreement, opposition, rejection, and denial. Contradictions are to be a source of strength, because I find polarities within myself. I can integrate the polar opposites in me and achieve a mature sense of wholeness." [ibid. p 42]]

* Describe a time when you found a contradiction within yourself and you brought the two sides into a satisfying blend.

* How do you evaluate your learning in this course? How many hours did it take you to complete the amount of homework you completed? How do you imagine I would evaluate your work?

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself.

Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others.

Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

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Existential Review Part 21, TRANSCEND YOUR EGO by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

2008-12-10T19:16:08Z

Existential Review Part 21, TRANSCEND YOUR EGO by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first 4 lessons,
continue the exploration of the existential model with Ideal 5. Share your reactions to the existential explorations and let others benefit from your explorations.

GROW; EXPAND AND TRANSCEND YOUR SELF-DEFINITION (Ideal 18)
Growth is your-consciousness recognizing, synergizing and transcending itself by recognizing its oneness with its apparent other. "My life is an endless process of growing, emerging, and reaching out For me, to live is to grow. My concern is ... process and movement in my life. The meaning of my life is found in continual growth - in education, in human relationships, in occupational progress, in creativity, in building." [ibid., pp 371-380]

* I expanded my self-concept and grew when I ... (Finish)

* I’m now growing by ... (complete).

* I can grow more by ... (outline your growth program.).
***

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself.

Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others.

Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

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Existential Review Part 16 BE REALISTIC by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.,

2008-12-10T19:00:35Z

Existential Review Part 16 BE REALISTIC by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.,
sashalessinphd@... 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you've familiarized yourself with the ideals in
earlier lessons, continue the exploration of the existential model of
being starting with the next ideal; then share your results on this
site.

BE REALISTIC (Ideal 14)

Distinguish clearly among your self-definition (inwardness.,
subjectivity), what you view as non-self (object, world, other) and
the connection between them (dialogue, dialectic, synthesis). "I
clearly distinguish reality from fantasies, dreams, rationalizations
and wishful thinking. I am always in touch with what is real. (Ego-
cogito-cogitatum). I know that there is a reality beyond my
inwardness. I know that this reality is different from my subjective
ego. I know that this reality may be other people or the objects of
nature, but it can also be my body or my unconscious. I know that
this reality is independent of me. At all times I feel that I am
directly in touch with that external reality. I always sense that I
am in contact with that part of the world which is other than me.
Even while I am rationalizing, deceiving myself, or having fantasies,
I know that what is real is that I am dreaming." [Koestenbaum, op.
cit., pages 514-515]
****

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you
experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes
and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself
as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon
NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out
love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self
of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-
concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your
future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as
opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to
further growth.

sashalessinphd@...

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Existential Review Part 15 COMMIT by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.,

2008-12-10T18:58:38Z

Existential Review Part 15 COMMIT by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.,
sashalessinphd@... 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]

Now that you've familiarized yourself with the ideals in
earlier lessons, continue the exploration of the existential model of
being starting with the next ideal; then share your results on this
site.

COMMIT (Ideal 13)

Commit yourself by risking attachments (cathexes) to people,
principles, tasks and lifestyles. Commitment (also love) balances
your individuality and independence. You give meaning to your life by
investing your time, energy and interest in other people, in your
life's tasks, in the codes you choose to live by, and in your own
development.

* I commit myself to understand and live by these
PRINCIPLES ... (complete).

* I commit myself these PEOPLE and animals ...
List the names of each. After each name, specify how
you commit yourself.

1

2.

3

4

5* I consciously choose to embody the following
concepts in my style of living... (complete).

GROW IN A COMMITTED RELATIONSHIP

Are you now or do you want to be in a fulfilling, committed
relationship? Such a relationship, according to Everett Shostrom is
essential to your growth and fulfillment as a human being. [Shostrom,
E.,. Actualizing Therapy, San Diego: Edits, 1976.]

When you're committed to making your relationship work, even
though you have differences and occasional conflicts, you have chosen
to use your energy wisely. The key to such a committed growthful
relationship, deciding to openly express your thoughts, emotions and
body needs to your partner and to receive all of your partner's
ideas, feelings and physical expression in a spirit of trust and
compassion. If you do this, you can successfully grow through the
stages of loving fulfillment.

Shostrom identifies the stages in a loving relation as
emphasizing the dimensions of eros, empathy, friendship and
affection. Full development of each of these stages is essential to
your relationship becoming fulfilling and growthful.

The first stage of your relationship, its first six years, is the
erotic stage. It's sexually-based and involves kissing, petting,
depending, jealousy and fighting. You and your partner usually enter
the relationship with idealized, unrealistic images of each other's
worth, beauty and power. Your task during this stage is to realize
your partner is a normal human being with faults and weaknesses, who
is not going to totally take care of all your desires. You learn to
meet your own needs and to enjoy your partner as she or he is.

You learn through constructive fighting to respect each
other's differences. You learn that the sure way to feel your love is
to also express your anger and work it through creatively.

Working out your differences takes you to the second stage in
a growthful relationship: empathy. The empathy stage develops fully
in the sixth to twelfth years of your relationship when you and your
partner deepen your compassion, appreciation and tolerance of your
differences.

As your relationship deepens, in its 13th to 21st years, you
enter the friendship stage. Now you deliberately expand your common
interests by traveling, entertaining and becoming good friends with
other couples.

The culminating stage in a fulfilling relationship is
affection. Here you find "a sense of completion in the spontaneous
joy and achievements" of your partner. You use your resources to
help your partner find fulfillment.

"Love, in its fullest expression," requires elements of all
the stages-- "the power and tenderness of Eros, the understanding and
vulnerability of empathy, the assertion and relatedness of
friendship" and "the responsibility and receptivity" of affection.
When you have all these you make with your -.partner more love,
awareness, creativity and joy than you ever could alone.

* Relate Shostrom's model of development for a committed
relationship to your own, to your parents' or to others'.

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Existential Review Part 14 AFFIRMATION by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.,

2008-12-10T18:57:28Z

Existential Review Part 14 AFFIRMATION by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.,
sashalessinphd@... 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you've familiarized yourself with the ideals in earlier lessons, continue the exploration of the existential model of
being starting with the next ideal; then share your results on this site.

SAY YES TO LIFE (AFFIRMATION) (Ideal 12)

Allow yourself natural optimism, joy and abundance. Affirm
life. "Make living itself the highest value." This is your moment
of eternal bliss and unique individual embodied pleasure, challenge
and reunion. Enjoy it.

This ideal, life, exists in the context of (and is a part of)
its polar opposite, death. Together life and death (limits) comprise
a dimension for embodied existence.

COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS

* List your joys, pleasures and fulfillments. Experience
the emotions, images, sounds, tastes, fragrances and intuitions
accompanying each. List and experience your appreciations.

Say "I am a beautiful and radiant, wondrous cosmic miracle."
Say it louder. Move your arms, trunk and legs, shout with all the
emotion, action and sound you can muster: "I am a beautiful and
radiant, wondrous cosmic miracle!"

* I Say yes to life by... (complete).
***

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you
experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes
and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself
as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon
NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out
love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self
of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-
concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your
future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as
opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to
further growth.

sashalessinphd@...

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Existential Review Part 13 FREEDOM & GUILT by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.,

2008-12-10T18:56:11Z

Existential Review Part 13 FREEDOM & GUILT by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.,
sashalessinphd@... 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you've familiarized yourself with the ideals in earlier lessons, continue the exploration of the existential model of
being starting with the next ideal; then share your results on this site.

YOU'RE FREE TO CHOOSE VALUES AND SELF-CONCEPTS
ACCEPT GUILT FOR YOUR CHOICES AS SIGNALS TO D0 BETTER (Ideal 11)

You are unavoidably free. Deliberately choose a level of
consciousness and an orientation on the inward-outward and individual-
universal poles of existence. You likewise choose your own self-
concept, actions, attitudes, values and the meanings with which you
organize your world.

Exercise your freedom from the perspective of your
individuality by willpower overcoming obstacles. Exercise the
freedom given you from your individuality as spontaneity when you
meditate, hike, travel, relax or receive a message. These practices
help you to expand beyond your individual personality and flow with
shared consciousness with other people, nature and the universe.
Exercise freedom inwardly as understanding when you analyze and
meditate.

Experience your freedom outwardly by risking assertive
action. Risked, outward action is necessary for you to live from the
existential ideal of freedom; outward action you choose is a
commitment you must make whose consequences define your being in the
world.

You're free when you listen to your inner voices, see your
inner visions, feel your subjective feelings and translate these into
action.

When you passively choose to ignore your freedom, you
experience healthy existential guilt. Your existential guilt is the
realistic assessment that you are not exercising your freedom, not
living up to your positive possibilities, denying your potentials,
living inauthentically from passively accepted (rather than
deliberately chosen) values.

EXPLORE HOW YOU EXERCISE YOUR FREEDOM

List the key decisions you already have made. Go back in
your experience to when you made them.

Notice which decisions you are still living from.

Indicate which decisions were right.

What would have been better choices?

What results would you have had if you made better decisions?

Be aware of any decisions you made which were untrue to your
authentic self-possibilities.

Note any resistance you created to stop yourself from making
authentic decisions.

Now think of the present. Focus on decisions that you are in
the process of making and on those you are not making.

* Prepare a list of five overdue decisions, prioritized by
importance to you.

Add a sixth overdue decision, "the one you were afraid to put
down." Feel your resistance to making these decisions in your body
and emotions; ask "in what organ you feel the resistance against
making a specific and necessary choice." Observe your resistance to
choosing in your failure patterns.

* What did you learn about your freedom and guilt?

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you
experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes
and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself
as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon
NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out
love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self
of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-
concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your
future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as
opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to
further growth.

sashalessinphd@...

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Existential Review Part 11 INDIVIDUALITY by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.,

2008-12-10T18:54:55Z

Existential Review Part 11 INDIVIDUALITY by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.,
sashalessinphd@... 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you've familiarized yourself with the ideals in earlier
lessons, continue the exploration of the existential model of being starting
with the next ideal:

REALIZE YOUR UNIQUE, CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY (Ideal 9)

Before you can broaden your self-definition (consciousness),
you need to be aware when you are choosing a narrower self-
definition. When you recognize your previously unconscious, passive
choice of a narrower self-identity, you're recognizing your
individuality, or narrower self. You then dialogue with what you
exclude from your self-definition. This dialogue begins when you
deliberately experience yourself in your narrower self-definition
(examples: public role, isolated bodymind). From this perspective,
objectify and tell it or them (repressed subpersonalities, your mate
and your peer group, in our examples) "No, I am not you. I'm not
bound by your ideas of who I am and how I should be." You then
become the non-self your narrow self is rejecting, realizing that the
non-self-other is actually a disowned part of your consciousness.
Your realization expands your self-definition (as integrated
personality, intersubjective dyadic couple consciousness, support
group) to include both your old, narrower self-definition and what
you excluded. You can, at any time, reinstate your narrower self-
aspect by deliberate choice among your broadened alternatives. By
deliberately choosing to experience your narrower self-
identifications, you experience their richness and creativity as well
as the harmony they achieve in higher order unison.

Be able, when you choose, to function as an individual
bodymind, a distinct, uniquely contributing facet of the social
groups and networks of which you are a part. "It is right and normal
for me to seem different from other human beings. I am free to
conform or not to conform as my value system dictates. I am not
excessively bothered by the fact that I may be different from my
peers. I am prepared to create my own direction right for me even
though it might differ from the prevailing lifestyles of those around
me. I am not easily pressured" to conform when my value system tells
me not to.

RELATE PERSONALLY TO THE INDIVIDUALITY IDEAL

* I asserted my individuality, despite pressure from others,
when I ... (complete).

* A person I admire for unique individuality is ...

* The person above showed individuality by... (complete).

* Today, I'll increase my individuality and assert my own
direction by ...
***

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you
experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes
and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself
as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon
NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out
love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self
of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-
concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your
future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as
opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to
further growth.

sashalessinphd@...

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Existential Review (Pt 9) PHENOMENOLOGICAL SELF-DISCLOSURE by Sasha

2008-12-10T18:53:24Z

Existential Review (Pt 9) PHENOMENOLOGICAL SELF-DISCLOSURE by Sasha
Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@... 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in earlier
lessons, continue the exploration of the existential model with the ideal,
Live and Reflect: Use Phenomenological Bracketing (Epoche). Share
your reactions to the existential explorations and let others benefit
from your explorations.

LIVE AND REFLECT: USE PHENOMENOLOGICAL BRACKETING (EPOCHE) (Ideal 7)

Successive contemplation and deliberate awareness of the
consciousness doing the contemplation reveals (as you learned in the
second existential ideal) the hierarchy of self-consciousness. When
you think about, picture and sense your self as an object, you
enlarge your self-concept from a preself to a public facade, and then
to an integrated orchestra of subselves. Reflection reveals you next
as a unified mental/physiological organism, a coupled,
intersubjective consciousness and a vessel through which flow social,
ecological, cosmic and eternal consciousness. The existential ideal
of reflection involves becoming aware of your presuppositions so you
can avoid distorting the object you observe, including the structure
of your own consciousness, by your presuppositions. You create a
first-hand, experiential description of your observations.
When you reflected upon your death anxiety, you discovered
your archetypal decision to be an individual bodymind, differentiated
from the other contents of time and space. You also reflected on the
time and space dimensions of nature from the perspective of the
infinite, unchanging, supra- individual ground of your existence.
This ground is your consciousness beyond time and space that flows through you and lasts forever, in
which your bodymind is forever a unique event--unity consciousness.
For you to live a full and authentic life, choose continually
the levels of consciousness from which to respond. Alternate between
active, outgoing engagement with apparent non-self entities and
reflective withdrawal from narrower self-perspectives using
meditation, prayer, artistic endeavor, confrontational encounter,
yoga, Tai Chi, meditative athletics, nature appreciation,
introspection, church-going and detachment from what you are doing to
gain full benefits of both living and reflecting.

* Reflect upon and describe your existence.
****

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you
experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes
and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself
as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon
NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.
Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out
love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self
of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-
concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.
LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your
future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as
opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to
further growth.

sashalessinphd@...

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Existential Review Part 8 NEGATION, FINITUDE, DEATH - Sasha Lessin,

2008-12-10T18:50:34Z

Existential Review Part 8 NEGATION, FINITUDE, DEATH - Sasha Lessin,
Ph.D. (UCLA)

USE LIMITS TO MAKE LIFE MEANINGFUL; REFLECT ON NEGATION, FINITUDE,
DEATH by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@... 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first lessons, continue the exploration of the existential model of being
starting with Ideal 6.

USE LIMITS TO MAKE LIFE MEANINGFUL; REFLECT ON NEGATION, FINITUDE,
DEATH (Ideal 6)

Accept that your physical body will die and you move to live
with full vitality, individuality and commitment. Realize you and
others will die prompts you to make authentic, intimate, feelingful,
expressive contact. Knowing you'll die gives you timetables for the
tasks you've chosen to give meaning to your life. When you choose to
die you take responsibility for creating your individual, unique life
in the limited amount of time you have. This is the only opportunity
you have to fully savor this moment. Carpe diem.

Accept your bodymind death and the hierarchy of consciousness
and you can identify with broader regions of consciousness (such as a
humanitarian cause, transcendent art, an archetypical deity form or
unity consciousness).

Use Death to See Unfinished Communication and Tasks

[Based on Woolger, R., Other Lives, Other Selves, NY: Doubleday,
1987; Baldwin, W., Spirit Releasement Therapy, 2nd Edn., Human
Potential Foundation, 1993; Fisher, J., The Case for Reincarnation
NY: Bantam, 1985]

Have a partner, the reader, read you the cues in bold print
(not the small, regular print in square brackets []--read those
silently; they're instructions for your reader).

WHEN SOMEONE'S DIED

Lie down. close your eyes. Remember someone you knew who
died. Say that person's name. [= X. Use name given above for 'X]

Imagine X hears you now. Tell him/her what you Left unsaid.

Pretend you're X and reply.

Have a dialogue--switch back and forth role-playing you and x.

If you'd like X to forgive you, ask.

Be X and forgive.

Be you again. If there's something you held against X make
a gesture of forgiveness and forgive him/her aloud.

WHEN YOUR BELOVED DIES

Visualize your dearest living person. Tell me his or her
person's name [use for Y].

Make-believe Y has only a few hours of life left, hours to
spend with you.

Talk to Y as though she or he were here now for the last time
this life.

Imagine you're Y. What, in these circumstances, do you say.

What, as yourself again, do you want to add?

WHEN YOU'VE ONE WEEK TO LIVE

Imagine you have one week to live. Fantasize a final get-
together with the people and animals who mean most to you. Say their
names.

Tell all, some or one of them any unfinished feelings you
have.

Tell your angry feelings.

Say the withholds--secrets, desires you held back.

Tell the people at your last get-together what you appreciate
in them.

Tell them the loving feelings and physical impulses for them.

Fantasize and describe doing what you want your last week of
life.

WHEN YOU DIE

Imagine a way you--but nobody else you know--are dying.
Describe your death scene and what leads up to it in the present
tense, as though it happens as you tell it. Put your body in the
physical position it has as it dies. [Wait till your partner moves
into position]

Tell me who's present when you die. Describe the situation.
What would you do if you still could? How would that feel?

Say goodbye to each of the people you loved. Address each in
turn and say your final words to them.

Tell each of them any unfinished feelings you have for each of them.

Tell them withholds--secrets, desires you held back.

Say what you appreciate, your loving feelings and physical
impulses toward them.

Tell me what negative conclusions you draw from this life
that you're now completing.

What vengeful thoughts do you still have as you die?

What jealous thoughts do you have at your death scene? Say
what you failed at in this life. Relate your successes in this life.

What positive conclusions do you draw from this life you're
now exiting?

What grateful, forgiving and loving thoughts are you dying
with? Say your last thoughts aloud.

What're your last words?

What does the life you're exiting leave you feeling
emotionally?

What angry feelings do you have as you leave this life? What
resentments do you carry to your death?

If you want to let go of those thoughts, rather than carry
them to future lives, express those resentments to those involved
now.

Tell me any sad or hopeless emotions you have as you leave
this life. What are your regrets?

What bitter feelings do you have as you leave this life?
What fears do vou carry as you leave this life?

What pains or physical traumas do you experience as you die?
[This paragraph should be read to women only] If you have the
spirits of any babies in your abdomen, talk to them aloud and release
their spirits.

Express emotions stored in injured, abused or neglected parts
of your body before you die, so you don't take these feelings on to
future embodiments. If your wounds were perpetrated by another
person, express your feelings to him or her. If you injured or
abused yourself, just express the emotions of your hurt parts to me.

What're the last things you see? Tell me the last thing you
hear. Say the last things you touch, smell and taste.

Move and make sounds as you experience your death. Feel life
ebbing from you. [Allow several minutes, at least]

Imagine that you are laid out as you might be in a
coffin, urn, or other funerary receptacle. (Gently lay partner's
body into a position of a body in a coffin.)

You're going to go to your own funeral. [ Adapted from
Huxley, L. You Are Not The Target NY: Avon, 1963.]

See all the people who have come to your funeral. See them
all.

There may be someone whom you're surprised to see at your
funeral. See if there's someone like that. Say who.

Is there someone at your funeral who's glad you're dead?
Take a look. Tell me who."

Notice if someone at your funeral wishes he or she were dead
instead of you. Tell me.

See the flowers people sent to your funeral. See them all.
See and smell each bouquet separately.

Who sent you which flowers?

There's music at your funeral. Hear the music."

The people at your funeral come, one by one, to view your
remains and pay their-last respects to you.

The first'? person to view your earthly remains is someone
who you loved deeply when you were alive. Who is this person?

(the person's name) approaches your coffin (or
urn), you know what she (or he) is feeling and thinking.
Become (name.") As voice your feelings and
thoughts toward (partner's name).

Now you're quite dead, you cannot respond or reply to this
person whom you loved. But if you could reply, what would you say
at your funeral to this person you loved?"

If you were still able to move, how would you like to touch
this person?

And now that person moves on, and the next person comes up to
your coffin. This is a person who, when you were alive, loved you a
great deal. Become this person, view and express your thoughts and
feelings toward the deceased.

If you weren't dead, and you still had one last chance to
respond to this person who loved you, what would you do and how would
you move toward this person?

The next person to come up to your lifeless form is someone
who, in life, you had difficulty with. Who is this person?

Become this person and state your existence as you look at `s
remains.
Become yourself, dead, again. Reply to this person as you
might and move as you might if you weren't dead.

[Have your partner successively be confronted in her funerary
receptacle by each person of emotional importance to her present at
her imaginary funeral. For each have her successively become the
other and voice thoughts and feelings as the other views your
partner's remains. Your partner then becomes herself and responds as
she would were she not dead.]

Now that you're dead you can reflect on a decision you were
making in life and know clearly what you should have decided. Say
what you should have decided.

Your eulogy-is about to begin. Notice who rises to speak
about your life and its meaning. Who is this person and what do you
feel about his (or her) speaking at your funeral?

Become the eulogizer and summarize, moralize and review the
life of the deceased and the meaning of her existence.

Now become yourself, hearing your eulogy. Do you agree with
what the eulogizer is saying? Are there parts you disagree about?
Establish a dialogue between you and your eulogizer, shifting roles
where appropriate.

This is your last party. Speak to everyone there, tell them
all about yourself, your mistakes, suffering, love and longings. No
longer do you need to protect yourself. It's your last party; You
can explode, be miserable, pitiful, insignificant or despicable. At
your funeral you can be yourself.

Imagine your coffin is being covered (or your ashes are about
to be cast, etc.) The light is shut off from your corpse. Your
coffin is lowered into the ground. Then the handful, then shovels
full of earth cover you. The world as you knew it is distant.

Are any disembodied souls or demonic spirits attached to
you? If so, tell me what you know about them.

Let your body go through the throes of death. Exhale your
last breath, experience your last heartbeat. Tell me exactly what is
happening as you die.

Separate from your body and suffering. Feel relief and
peace.
See, from above, the people nearby. Try, but fail to talk to
and touch them. Realize you died.

Whoosh down a tunnel, then up toward the light. Let the
spirits of loved ones who already died extend their hands to guide
you and take you to the place of karmic review. Who reaches out to
guide you up toward the light?

Let your guides take you to the loving beings of Light, the
Karmic Guides or the Life-Review Committee. Let them show you, by
giving you direct experiences, the main events of your life and their
consequences for others. Say what you're seeing.

Witness and tell me about the love you gave and the love you
got. What did you need to learn from your life? What did you need to
experience that life?

At what, if any, point, did things go wrong?

What was the meaning of that life, taken as a whole?

What would you do differently, if you had it to do again?

What did you contribute to humanity, to the consciousness of
the cosmos.

Find in the spirit world, one-by-one, the spirits of those
you hurt, betrayed or abandoned. What do you have to say to each of
them? Identify with each of them in turn, and as them, reply.

If you failed in this life, communicate with the spirits of
those whom you let down. Let them forgive and comfort you. Tell me
what they say.

Can you forgive yourself?

Find in the spirit world, one-by-one, the spirits of people
who hurt, betrayed or abandoned-you. Let each of them, in turn, use
your voice and talk to you.

And, now that you're in the spirit world too, what do you
have to say to each of them?

Dialogue aloud with any disembodied spirits attached to you
from the life you just lived. Tell them to find their loved ones
here in the light and to leave you now.

Converse aloud with any demonic spirits attached to you from
the life you just lived. Tell them, "Look within and see that you,
too, are of the light. So go now to your appointed place in the
light."

Imagine that the Beings of Light have decided that your
tenure in the life you just reviewed shouldn't be over so soon, that
you're being sent back to complete missions. What're your
assignments?

If it was hard to forgive yourself for anything, let the
Karmic Guides assign you tasks to balance your karma. You need not
make up your karma with the same persons you hurt or failed. What
are your karma-balancing tasks?

Return to this world. Wiggle your toes. Open and close your
hands. Stretch. Swallow twice. Open your eyes; look at three things
you enjoy seeing. Listen for three sounds you enjoy. Say your name
and today's date.

* Relate on this site the exercises you did in this section
to the existential idea that appreciation and acceptance of death
vitalizes life.

Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Existential Review Part 20 LIVE NOW, USING PAST FOCUSED ON FUTURE by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D. sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

2008-12-10T18:44:04Z

Existential Review Part 20 LIVE NOW, USING PAST FOCUSED ON FUTURE by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D. sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with the ideals in earlier lessons, continue the exploration of the existential model of being starting with the next ideal; then share your results on this site.

EXPERIENCE TIME LIVING NOW, USING THE PAST FOCUSED ON YOUR FUTURE (Ideal 17)
When you recognize time, you differentiate yourself from the eternal moment (nunc stanz) of unity consciousness and identify with the flowing moments (nunc fluenz) which arise and pass. When he experiences time as flowing this way, Koestenbaum says, "I experience my life as a continuous progressing. My sense of time is not fragmented. My focus is on the future. I live in the present and I realize that both past and future are connected to me in the present. The burdens of the past exist for me in the present. Hopes and opportunities for the future exist for me in the present. I experience the time of my life as a river that flows always and smoothly in the direction of the future."

Consider whether any past burdens exist in the present for you. What present consequences of your past are salient for you now? Be aware of your past in your present.

What is your present awareness? What are you aware of now? What about now? Remain in continuous present awareness for several minutes.

Imagine what opportunities, challenges and chances exist for you in the future.

Picture your fondest hopes and desires being realized. As you imagine the future, be aware that your hopes for the future now.

Be aware that the separation of consciousness into conceptual categories of past (dead), present and future (unborn) is a linguistic, analytic, conceptual, illusory bounding of atemporal unity consciousness.
***

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

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Existential Review Part 12 TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

2008-12-10T18:41:50Z

Existential Review Part 12 TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]

Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with the ideals in earlier lessons,
continue the exploration of the existential model of being starting with the next Ideal; then share your reactions to the explorations on this site.

EXPERIENCE TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY REVERE THIS CORE SELF IN EACH AND ALL (Ideal 10)
Reflect on your individuality and become aware of yourself as reflecting from a position outside your personality and bodymind. Transcend reflection and become one with-the flow of unity itself. Directly experience your being at each level of self-definition as flowing through the center of the core of each of your narrow-order identifications as well as flowing also through cores of others from whom you illusorily separated yourself. Know you are one with all your human parts, through which the same consciousness flows. Recognize your own center and you recognize the centers of others. Once you live from this knowledge, you respect the conscious centers of all people; you experience their inward cores as one and the same as yours.
"Each individual human inward subjectivity is the divine consciousness in man. Reverence for subjectivity is the highest existential principle of morality. Man's inwardness is the source of his value. I am capable of respecting infinitely the inner ego of both myself and others. A person's character may be evil and his body diseased, but his pure inner conscious core is infinitely precious and eternally dignified." Men are therefore born with unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Koestenbaum calls this reverence, "the highest existential principle of morality." [op cit, page 514]
RESPECT AND REVERE ANOTHER'S CONSCIOUSNESS

* Think of someone whose attitude you find difficult to accept. Then, with regards to this person, complete the following: I can forgive and feel compassion for by... (complete.)

* I’ve been intolerant of . Today and I’ll revere her/him by ....

EVIL
Koestenbaum contrasts respect and regard for the consciousness of others (reverence) with disrespect and disregard, which are existentially evil. "Evil is disrespect for, disregard for or destruction of any consciousness," because you can observe, from your center, that the consciousness of others is part of your own precious consciousness. Evil is also "disrespect for, disregard for or destruction of the freedom of any human being, for to be free is the essence of consciousness. Evil is disrespect for, disregard for or destruction of the right to love and security for any human being."

Evil, or disrespect for consciousness, takes specific forms: ignorance, ugliness, weakness, alienation, poverty and chaos. Whichever form of evil disturbs you most points to your life goal :grappling with it. If ignorance is the evil most bothering to you, your goal becomes knowledge. If ugliness is your evil, artistic goals will give your life broadening meaning. If weakness is your evil, your goal becomes power. If alienation is your evil, improving social relations is your task. If the greatest evil from your perspective is chaos, your goal becomes unity consciousness.
COPE WITH EVIL

* Rank the following evils in order of how much each troubles you:
ignorance,
ugliness,
weakness,
alienation,
poverty,
chaos.

How do you struggle against the evils which trouble you most?

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.
LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

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Existential Review Part 19 BE FLEXIBLE AND ADAPTABLE by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D. sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

2008-12-10T18:17:15Z

Existential Review Part 19 BE FLEXIBLE AND ADAPTABLE by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D. sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with the ideals in earlier lessons, continue the exploration of the existential model of being starting with the next ideal; then share your results on this site.

BE FLEXIBLE AND ADAPTABLE (Ideal 16)
For this existential ideal, Koestenbaum suggests you decide to be adaptable and realistically flexible. Say, "I can be reflective and inward or active and outgoing, depending on my own choices and the circumstances in which I find myself. I can be self-reliant and independent if I want to and have to, but I also can be dependent and trusting if I choose that personality structure. I can be both a leader and a follower, as my decisions and the world's circumstances dictate."
* Relate specific times in your life when you are flexible.
* Whom do you think of a person who is a model, paragon or exemplar of flexibility.

* I can increase my flexibility by... (complete).

***

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com
ice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with the ideals in earlier lessons, continue the exploration of the existential model of being starting with the next ideal; then share your results on this site.

EXPERIENCE TIME LIVING NOW, USING THE PAST FOCUSED ON YOUR FUTURE (Ideal 17)

When you recognize time, you differentiate yourself from the eternal moment (nunc stanz) of unity consciousness and identify with the flowing moments (nunc fluenz) which arise and pass. When he experiences time as flowing this way, Koestenbaum says, "I experience my life as a continuous progressing. My sense of time is not fragmented. My focus is on the future. I live in the present and I realize that both past and future are connected to me in the present. The burdens of the past exist for me in the present. Hopes and opportunities for the future exist for me in the present. I experience the time of my life as a river that flows always and smoothly in the direction of the future."

Consider whether any past burdens exist in the present for you. What present consequences of your past are salient for you now? Be aware of your past in your present.

What is your present awareness? What are you aware of now? What about now? Remain in continuous present awareness for several minutes.

Imagine what opportunities, challenges and chances exist for you in the future.

Picture your fondest hopes and desires being realized. As you imagine the future, be aware that your hopes for the future now.

Be aware that the separation of consciousness into conceptual categories of past (dead), present and future (unborn) is a linguistic, analytic, conceptual, illusory bounding of atemporal unity consciousness.
***

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

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Existential Review Part 18 ENCOUNTER AND LOVE OTHERS by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

2008-12-10T17:46:16Z

Existential Review Part 18 ENCOUNTER AND LOVE OTHERS by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978.]

Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with the ideals in earlier lessons, continue the exploration of the existential model of being starting with the next ideal; then share your results on this site.

ENCOUNTER AND LOVE OTHERS (Ideal 15)

Simultaneously experience your current level of self-identification (subpersonality, personality, bodymind, etc.), the uniqueness of the nonself you encounter (shadow, body, other person, another culture, etc.) and the joy and excitement of recognizing you and the other are a single field of consciousness.

Referring to the bodymind level of love, Koestenbaum writes, "I can choose to meet, confront, witness, understand, and be mirrored by another. I can also choose to love him or her and care for him or her. l am capable of loving like an adult. I can love spiritually and I can love ,physically. In love I can accept the dignity and the needs of my partner in love. I enjoy spiritual, emotional, and physical love and love is easy and natural for me." You and the person you reciprocally love transcend your respective identifications as isolated bodyminds. You recognize your differences and the unique contributions you each have to make to the intimate dyadic consciousness you become.

LOVE AND ENCOUNTER UNIQUE OTHER

The exercise below is heighten your awareness of your respective unique backgrounds. It is also designed for you to reflect upon your relationship from your dyadic consciousness.

Your Relationship

Think of someone emotionally important to you and with whom you are in regular (at least weekly) contact (directly, person-to-person, not phone or letter). If you have a spouse, lover, or sweetheart with whom you regularly spend time, think of this person. For this exercise, refer to this person as your "significant other."

Write the name of your significant other. Put her or his picture in front of you.

Describe your relations with this person from your perspective.

Describe your relationship with your other from his or her perspective. If your other will tell you how she or he views your relationship, record what is said. If your other is unavailable for comment, fantasize her or his view, label it "guessing," and record it. Chapters of Other's Life

Write the chapters of your significant other's life. The best way to do this is with the help of your other. If she or he agrees to help you, share with her/him the chapters of your life as a model. If she/he declines to help you, write the chapters anyway, as best you can, and indicate these circumstances.

Make a list of 8-12 chapters. Start with the birth and family situation into which she/he was born. Include childhood and adolescent chapters from your other's lifebook, for these are the years during which her/his current attitudes were greatly formed. Include your other's present life chapter. Also speculate on her/his future chapters.

Put the approximate years for each chapter of your other's life. For each chapter, write the main events.

For each chapter, note the main self-feelings of your other.

For each chapter, note the important persons and describe their relation- ship with your other.

Make a similar table of contents for your own lifebook.

Share your lifebook with your other. If you have written a speculative lifebook's contents for your other, share this for commentary and revision. Get to know each other's unique individual history in greater detail and broader scope.

History of Your Relationship

* Write the chapters of your relationship with your significant other. Specify the phases of your relationship and the years, events, people, and feelings for each chapter. Begin with your initial encounters and the early impressions you had of each other. Share and discuss with your other.

FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP [Inspiration: Corrierre, R., and Hart, J., Psychological Fitness, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979.]

Analyze your relationship with your most significant other in terms of how active, feeling, expressive, understanding, and contacting you are in the relationship. Plot your analysis on the following graph, where 5 = very much and I = very little.

Circle the elements of your graph which are out of balance. Choose a small, easy-to-do step to achieve greater balance in your relationship. Take your step daily for one week.
***

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Existential Review Pt 10 INDEPENDENCE - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol

2008-12-10T16:48:54Z

Existential Review Pt 10 INDEPENDENCE - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol

Existential Review Pt 10 INDEPENDENCE - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.,
sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first
lessons, continue the exploration with Ideal 8:

BE INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT, AND SUBJECTIVE (TO BALANCE LOVE AND
COMMITMENT) (Ideal 8)

Recognize and respect your own strengths and abilities and
feel confident, assertive and able to risk loving and committing
yourself to other people. Koestenbaum explains this existential
ideal as follows: "I am an adult consciousness that exists alone: I
choose to be independent and self- reliant. l have outgrown childish
forms of dependency. I can be comfortable being alone. I can go
through life on my own two feet. I can take care of myself--and
others if necessary. I feel that this independence and my self-
reliance is an attitude that I voluntary choose and not one that is
imposed upon me from the outside." He goes on to point out that you
need your independence and individuality to authenticate your
commitments to others.

CONTEMPLATE & FUTURE-PACE SELF-RELIANCE

* I was self-reliant when ... (complete).

* My model of a self-reliant person is , because
s/he ....

Review: EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES:

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you
experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes
and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself
as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon
NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out
love and commitment.) This lesson.

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self
of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-
concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your
future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as
opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to
further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Existential Review Pt 10 INDEPENDENCE - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com

2008-12-10T16:44:14Z

Existential Review Pt 10 INDEPENDENCE - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first 9 lessons,
continue the exploration Ideal 8:

BE INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT, AND SUBJECTIVE (TO BALANCE LOVE AND COMMITMENT) (Ideal 8)
Recognize and respect your own strengths and abilities and feel confident, assertive and able to risk loving and committing yourself to other people. Koestenbaum explains this existential ideal as follows: "I am an adult consciousness that exists alone: I choose to be independent and self- reliant. l have outgrown childish forms of dependency. I can be comfortable being alone. I can go through life on my own two feet. I can take care of myself--and others if necessary. I feel that this independence and my self-reliance is an attitude that I voluntary choose and not one that is imposed upon me from the outside." He goes on to point out that you need your independence and individuality to authenticate your commitments to others.

CONTEMPLATE & FUTURE-PACE SELF-RELIANCE
* I was self-reliant when ... (complete).

* My model of a self-reliant person is , because s/he ....

Review: The Existential Principles:

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.
Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.
LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

LIVE AND REFLECT: USE PHENOMENOLOGICAL BRACKETING (EPOCHE) (Ideal 7)

Successive contemplation and deliberate awareness of the consciousness doing the contemplation reveals (as you learned in the second existential ideal) the hierarchy of self-consciousness. When you think about, picture and sense your self as an object, you enlarge your self-concept from a preself to a public facade, and then to an integrated orchestra of subselves. Reflection reveals you next as a unified mental/physiological organism, a coupled, intersubjective consciousness and a vessel through which flow social, ecological, cosmic and eternal consciousness. The existential ideal of reflection involves becoming aware of your presuppositions so you can avoid distorting the object you observe, including the structure of your own consciousness, by your presuppositions. You create a first-hand, experiential description of your observations.

When you reflected upon your death anxiety, you discovered your archetypal decision to be an individual bodymind, differentiated from the other contents of time and space. You also reflected on the time and space dimensions of nature from the perspective of the infinite, unchanging, supra- individual ground of your existence. This ground is your consciousness beyond time and space that flows through you and lasts forever, in which your bodymind is forever a unique event--unity consciousness.

For you to live a full and authentic life, choose continually the levels of consciousness from which to respond. Alternate between active, outgoing engagement with apparent non-self entities and reflective withdrawal from narrower self-perspectives using meditation, prayer, artistic endeavor, confrontational encounter, yoga, Tai Chi, meditative athletics, nature appreciation, introspection, church-going and detachment from what you are doing to gain full benefits of both living and reflecting.

* Reflect upon and describe your existence.

Review: THE EXISTENTIAL PRINCIPLES (See each on this site):

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Existential Review Part 7 NEGATION, FINITUDE, DEATH - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D. (UCLA)

2008-12-09T19:45:23Z

Existential Review Part 7 NEGATION, FINITUDE, DEATH - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D. (UCLA)

USE LIMITS TO MAKE LIFE MEANINGFUL; REFLECT ON NEGATION, FINITUDE, DEATH
by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first 7 lessons,
continue the exploration of the existential model of being starting with Ideal 6.

USE LIMITS TO MAKE LIFE MEANINGFUL; REFLECT ON NEGATION, FINITUDE, DEATH (Ideal 6)

Accept that your physical body will die and you move to live with full vitality, individuality and commitment. Realize you and others will die prompts you to make authentic, intimate, feelingful, expressive contact. Knowing you’ll die gives you timetables for the tasks you’ve chosen to give meaning to your life. When you choose to die you take responsibility for creating your individual, unique life in the limited amount of time you have. This is the only opportunity you have to fully savor this moment. Carpe diem.

Accept your bodymind death and the hierarchy of consciousness and you can identify with broader regions of consciousness (such as a humanitarian cause, transcendent art, an archetypical deity form or unity consciousness).

Use Death to See Unfinished Communication and Tasks

[Based on Woolger, R., Other Lives, Other Selves, NY: Doubleday, 1987; Baldwin, W., Spirit Releasement Therapy, 2nd Edn., Human Potential Foundation, 1993; Fisher, J., The Case for Reincarnation NY: Bantam, 1985]

Have a partner, the reader, read you the cues in bold print (not the small, regular print in square brackets []--read those silently; they're instructions for your reader).

WHEN SOMEONE’S DIED

Lie down. close your eyes. Remember someone you knew who died. Say that person's name. [= X. Use name given above for 'X]

Imagine X hears you now. Tell him/her what you Left unsaid.

Pretend you're X and reply.

Have a dialogue--switch back and forth role-playing you and x.

If you'd like X to forgive you, ask.

Be X and forgive.

Be you again. If there's something you held against X make a gesture of forgiveness and forgive him/her aloud.

WHEN YOUR BELOVED DIES

Visualize your dearest living person. Tell me his or her person's name [use for Y].

Make-believe Y has only a few hours of life left, hours to spend with you.

Talk to Y as though she or he were here now for the last time this life.

Imagine you're Y. What, in these circumstances, do you say.

What, as yourself again, do you want to add?

WHEN YOU’VE ONE WEEK TO LIVE

Imagine you have one week to live. Fantasize a final get-together with the people and animals who mean most to you. Say their names.

Tell all, some or one of them any unfinished feelings you have.

Tell your angry feelings.

Say the withholds--secrets, desires you held back.

Tell the people at your last get-together what you appreciate in them.

Tell them the loving feelings and physical impulses for them.

Fantasize and describe doing what you want your last week of life.

WHEN YOU DIE

Imagine a way you--but nobody else you know--are dying. Describe your death scene and what leads up to it in the present tense, as though it happens as you tell it. Put your body in the physical position it has as it dies. [Wait till your partner moves into position]

Tell me who's present when you die. Describe the situation. What would you do if you still could? How would that feel?

Say goodbye to each of the people you loved. Address each in turn and say your final words to them.

Tell each of them any unfinished feelings you have for each of them.

Tell them withholds--secrets, desires you held back.

Say what you appreciate, your loving feelings and physical impulses toward them.

Tell me what negative conclusions you draw from this life that you're now completing.

What vengeful thoughts do you still have as you die?

What jealous thoughts do you have at your death scene? Say what you failed at in this life. Relate your successes in this life.

What positive conclusions do you draw from this life you're now exiting?

What grateful, forgiving and loving thoughts are you dying with? Say your last thoughts aloud.
What're your last words?

What does the life you're exiting leave you feeling emotionally?

What angry feelings do you have as you leave this life? What resentments do you carry to your death?

If you want to let go of those thoughts, rather than carry them to future lives, express those resentments to those involved now.

Tell me any sad or hopeless emotions you have as you leave this life. What are your regrets?

What bitter feelings do you have as you leave this life? What fears do vou carry as you leave this life?

What pains or physical traumas do you experience as you die?

[This paragraph should be read to women only] If you have the spirits of any babies in your abdomen, talk to them aloud and release their spirits.

Express emotions stored in injured, abused or neglected parts of your body before you die, so you don't take these feelings on to future embodiments. If your wounds were perpetrated by another person, express your feelings to him or her. If you injured or abused yourself, just express the emotions of your hurt parts to me.

What're the last things you see? Tell me the last thing you hear. Say the last things you touch, smell and taste.

Move and make sounds as you experience your death. Feel life ebbing from you. [Allow several minutes, at least]

Imagine that you are laid out as you might be in a coffin, urn, or other funerary receptacle. (Gently lay partner's body into a position of a body in a coffin.)

You’re going to go to your own funeral. [ Adapted from Huxley, L. You Are Not The Target NY: Avon, 1963.]

See all the people who have come to your funeral. See them all.

There may be someone whom you're surprised to see at your funeral. See
if there's someone like that. Say who.

Is there someone at your funeral who's glad you're dead? Take a look. Tell me who."

Notice if someone at your funeral wishes he or she were dead instead of you. Tell me.

See the flowers people sent to your funeral. See them all. See and smell each bouquet separately.

Who sent you which flowers?

There's music at your funeral. Hear the music."

The people at your funeral come, one by one, to view your remains and pay their-last respects to you.

The first'? person to view your earthly remains is someone who you loved deeply when you were alive. Who is this person?

(the person's name) approaches your coffin (or urn), you know what she (or he) is feeling and thinking.
Become (name.") As voice your feelings and thoughts toward (partner's name).

Now you're quite dead, you cannot respond or reply to this person whom you loved. But if you could reply, what would you say at your funeral to this person you loved?"

If you were still able to move, how would you like to touch this person?

And now that person moves on, and the next person comes up to your coffin. This is a person who, when you were alive, loved you a great deal. Become this person, view and express your thoughts and feelings toward the deceased.

If you weren't dead, and you still had one last chance to respond to this person who loved you, what would you do and how would you move toward this person?

The next person to come up to your lifeless form is someone who, in life, you had difficulty with. Who is this person?

Become this person and state your existence as you look at ‘s remains.
Become yourself, dead, again. Reply to this person as you might and move as you might if you weren't dead.

[Have your partner successively be confronted in her funerary receptacle by each person of emotional importance to her present at her imaginary funeral. For each have her successively become the other and voice thoughts and feelings as the other views your partner's remains. Your partner then becomes herself and responds as she would were she not dead.]

Now that you're dead you can reflect on a decision you were making in life and know clearly what you should have decided. Say what you should have decided.

Your eulogy-is about to begin. Notice who rises to speak about your life and its meaning. Who is this person and what do you feel about his (or her) speaking at your funeral?

Become the eulogizer and summarize, moralize and review the life of the deceased and the meaning of her existence.

Now become yourself, hearing your eulogy. Do you agree with what the eulogizer is saying? Are there parts you disagree about? Establish a dialogue between you and your eulogizer, shifting roles where appropriate.

This is your last party. Speak to everyone there, tell them all about yourself, your mistakes, suffering, love and longings. No longer do you need to protect yourself. It’s your last party; You can explode, be miserable, pitiful, insignificant or despicable. At your funeral you can be yourself.

Imagine your coffin is being covered (or your ashes are about to be cast, etc.) The light is shut off from your corpse. Your coffin is lowered into the ground. Then the handful, then shovels full of earth cover you. The world as you knew it is distant.

Are any disembodied souls or demonic spirits attached to you? If so, tell me what you know about them.

Let your body go through the throes of death. Exhale your last breath, experience your last heartbeat. Tell me exactly what is happening as you die.

Separate from your body and suffering. Feel relief and peace.

See, from above, the people nearby. Try, but fail to talk to and touch them. Realize you died.

Whoosh down a tunnel, then up toward the light. Let the spirits of loved ones who already died extend their hands to guide you and take you to the place of karmic review. Who reaches out to guide you up toward the light?

Let your guides take you to the loving beings of Light, the Karmic Guides or the Life-Review Committee. Let them show you, by giving you direct experiences, the main events of your life and their consequences for others. Say what you're seeing.

Witness and tell me about the love you gave and the love you got. What did you need to learn from your life? What did you need to experience that life?

At what, if any, point, did things go wrong?

What was the meaning of that life, taken as a whole?

What would you do differently, if you had it to do again?

What did you contribute to humanity, to the consciousness of the cosmos.

Find in the spirit world, one-by-one, the spirits of those you hurt, betrayed or abandoned. What do you have to say to each of them? Identify with each of them in turn, and as them, reply.

If you failed in this life, communicate with the spirits of those whom you let down. Let them forgive and comfort you. Tell me what they say.

Can you forgive yourself?

Find in the spirit world, one-by-one, the spirits of people who hurt, betrayed or abandoned-you. Let each of them, in turn, use your voice and talk to you.

And, now that you're in the spirit world too, what do you have to say to each of them?

Dialogue aloud with any disembodied spirits attached to you from the life you just lived. Tell them to find their loved ones here in the light and to leave you now.

Converse aloud with any demonic spirits attached to you from the life you just lived. Tell them, “Look within and see that you, too, are of the light. So go now to your appointed place in the light.”

Imagine that the Beings of Light have decided that your tenure in the life you just reviewed shouldn’t be over so soon, that you're being sent back to complete missions. What're your assignments?

If it was hard to forgive yourself for anything, let the Karmic Guides assign you tasks to balance your karma. You need not make up your karma with the same persons you hurt or failed. What are your karma-balancing tasks?

Return to this world. Wiggle your toes. Open and close your hands. Stretch. Swallow twice. Open your eyes; look at three things you enjoy seeing. Listen for three sounds you enjoy. Say your name and today's date.

* Relate on this site the exercises you did in this section to the existential idea that appreciation and acceptance of death vitalizes life.

Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

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Existential Review Part 7 ANXIETY AS EXCITEMENT - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D. (UCLA)

2008-12-09T19:27:32Z

Existential Review Part 7 ANXIETY AS EXCITEMENT

DEFINE ANXIETY AS EXCITEMENT OF BROADENING SELF-CONSTITUTION BY SELF-DISCLOSURE
by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first 6 lessons,
continue the exploration of the existential model of being starting with Ideal 7

DEFINE ANXIETY AS EXCITEMENT OF BROADENING SELF-CONSTITUTION BY SELF-DISCLOSURE
[Based on Koestenbaum, P., op.cit., 1978, pages 218-225; Wilber, K., op.cit., 1977, pages 124, 204-205, 290-291 and 1981, page 156.]

You experience healthy excitement, or anxiety, at each level of awareness. Your anxiety’s a sign you are learning more of who you are. It’s also a sign of the pain and death of your narrower sense of who you are and the simultaneous rebirth of your wider sense of self. Your anxiety’s part of your knowledge that you are growing and will never be the same old you as you broaden your outlook.

You experience anxiety when you realize the mutual interdependence of your self-definition and your definition of non-self. You feel anxiety when you experience the dissolution of the line you drew separating you from the part of yourself which you denied (and projected onto others.) You’re anxious when you end your denial of your repressed potentials. You feel anxious when you experience freedom from being emotionally reactive to manifestations of your potential in others. You experience new anxiety as you encounter hitherto background separations on your new level of functioning. Your anxiety’s your path to dissolution of contraries into ever-broadening unities.

At your personality level, you experience anxiety as panic, which you generate from your own repressed excitement, interest, anger or pain. At your bodymind level, you experience anxiety as "a cold, almost paralyzing cramp" when you truly face the fact of your physical nonbeing and bodily death. On the higher transpersonal level, you experience anxiety when you realize that the last vestiges of your sense of a separate self that resists unity consciousness is ending.

Koestenbaum distinguishes the healthy existential anxiety you have been exploring from neurotic anxiety. Neurotic anxiety is your fear of experiencing your exciting, life-changing (existential) anxiety. Koestenbaum notes seven types of healthy, existential anxieties. You generate these anxieties when you break your mind-set, when you go beyond conventional answers and when you see your projections as discomfort with your own inner voices.

To experience healthy anxiety, writes Koestenbaum, grapple with the following existential ideals:
birth, risk and growth,
evil, morality and reverence,
God, centering and the pervasive ground of existence (unity
consciousness),
denial and acceptance of freedom of choice, timidity, death and limits,
individuality and conformity, and
guilt, depression or improvement.

Koestenbaum suggests you deliberately seek, welcome and crank-up these
anxieties to a level which is optimal for you to discover the meaning of your life.

* Today, I'll use my pain, suffering and anxiety by ... (Complete.)

Review: The Existential Principles:

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

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Existential Review Part 6: VALUE PAIN & ANXIETY - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

2008-12-09T18:55:43Z

Existential Review Part 6: VALUE PAIN & ANXIETY - Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first 5 lessons,
continue the exploration of the existential model with Ideal 6. Share your reactions to the existential explorations and let others benefit from your explorations.

VALUE PAIN & ANXIETY AS CHANCES TO LEARN (Ideal 5)
One of the keys to self-disclosure (Ideal 4) is exploring your negativity or pain. Your pain and negativity has forms for each level of consciousness. At your personality level, you experience emotional pain when any of your subselves is denied integrated expression. At your bodymind level, physical pain demands you abandon exclusive attachment to your personality as though it is all you are and that you integrate your body into your experienced self. At this level, your pain also demands you accept your decision to die (your archetypical decision for finitude.)
At social levels, your pain (the loneliness of exclusive identification with your bodymind as all that you are) leads you to include another person in your sense of you. You overcome the pain of separation from others further when you extend your love and care for your family, network, culture and all humanity. At higher transpersonal levels your pain points to your artificial separateness from nature and finally to you as your own final resistance to unity consciousness. At each level, your pain signals that you are separating yourself and that you can discover and include another in your awareness.

At each level of consciousness, use your pain to point to the apparent alienated, unacceptable truths about yourself, how you limit your awareness, and how you really are. You expand your consciousness when you extend your self-definition to include these resisted truths in your consciously experienced existence.

Koestenbaum summarizes the existential ideal that pain is useful for your growth, maturity and development as follows: "I choose to value my pains. Pain is unavoidable ... Anxiety and depression help me understand the meaning of life. I can successfully cope with the fact that evil is an integral part of life."

* Note a time when you experienced pain and used your experience to grow, mature, expand your consciousness, notice a neglected part of yourself or come closer to other people, nature or God.

Emotional Pain: Identification-Disidentification With Addictions (Archetypical Cathexes) - Preferences, Personality Integration

Ken Keyes writes that when you are hurting emotionally, you are giving yourself a signal to expand your narrow identification with one role, subselves or mind-tape and expand your self-concept to include wider roles, other subs and new mind-tapes. Keyes suggests you do the following exercise when you feel pain, unhappiness or negativity. To explore the addiction (how you tell yourself things must be for you to feel okay) you choose to upset yourself. You uplevel (reprogram) your addiction into a preference (a desire which, if unmet, does not hurt you.) Upleveling addictions to preferences allows you to accept, express, and disidentify with your unexpressed subs' demands, to accept their deeper needs for recognition, love and integration and to experience your personality as whole.

Do the exercise below with a partner. Take turns taking each other through this process. Locate yourselves in a private space where you won’t be interrupted for an hour or so.

Place nearby a plastic wastebasket or bucket large enough to completely cover your head and also allow breathing. Have your partner tell you (or tell yourself) the following:

Lie down on your back with your eyes closed and your legs and arms open. Breathe deeply through your mouth, allowing your belly to stick out when you breathe in, fall when you breathe out. Make a soft "ahh" sound with each breath as you let all the air out of your mouth.

Let your mind float back over the last week or earlier until you see, hear and feel a time when you are upset, suffering, uncomfortable, tense or critical.

Name the people involved in the incident. Tell me where the incident takes place. Describe the incident and the dialogue in the present tense, as though it is happening NOW.

How does your body feel during the incident?

Name the emotions you feel during this upset. Make sure they are feelings--like anger, hurt, jealousy, loneliness, fear, boredom--not thoughts.

What’s the internal dialogue that goes along with this scene? What’s really bugging you?

Go back through time to when you had similar feelings. Name the people, place, and time. Relive this incident in the present tense, telling yourself aloud how you feel about yourself during the incident.

Relive another incident from your past when you had similar feelings.
Return now to the recent upset with which you began this exercise. How did you want the people and things in your upset to have been or acted?

If the incident had gone the way you wanted it to, what would you get? What do you really want in this situation? State the demand linked to your suffering.

Tell me how your demand causes you suffering.

Say how this demand caused your suffering in the past.

Point out how this demand will cause you suffering in the future.

Tell me that you’re ready to drop the demand and stop suffering.

Create short, simple sentences, reality reminders, which free you from
the demand. They should feel right when said rapidly with intensity.

Keep your eyes closed, kneel on your knees with the top of your head
in the plastic wastebasket or bucket on the floor. Tense all your muscles. Breathe deeply and fast, keep your upsetting scenes in your mind. Say your reality reminders loudly and intensely.

Say your reality reminder louder. Yell. Louder! LOUDER!

Keep emoting your reality reminders in the bucket. Express them with
your whole body. Continue this as long as you feel emotional intensity from your upsetting scenes.

Take your head out of the bucket. Keeping your eyes closed, sit up. Breathe deeply. Imagine that you’re a hollow tube within which a ball of light moves up with each in-breath, and down with each out-breath. Allow a few minutes.

Let the ball of light within you move less and less until it comes to rest somewhere in your body. Put your hand where the ball stops.

Visualize the same scene which upset you, except this time imagine your new emotional response to be according to your reality reminders.

Open your eyes and tell me what this experience was like for you.

* Relate your experience with the exercise above to the existential idea that pain teaches you to grow .

Bodily Pain: Identification-Disidentification - Bodymind Integration
Physical pain gives you the chance to realize you have exclusively attached your conscious identity to your personality. The exercises to follow allow you to extend your self-identity, using physical pain as a guide, to your body. Begin with apparently trivial pain, and realize that this model can be extended to severe pain, and is a basis of holistic healing.

Focus your attention on a strong but bearable pain you or a partner are currently experiencing--a splinter, toothache, headache, infection, burn, indigestion, etc.

Experience the physical pain right now. Imagine this paragraph contains a subliminal, magical microclonal generator process which makes a small you who will explore your body's pain. You are generating a small you.

As very small you, enter your large body in a safe and convenient way and proceed to the source of the pain. Notice the shape, energy and appearance of the pain and the areas around it. Notice its color, temperature, smell and tension. Now become the pain. Identify with it. State your existence.

As little you, manipulate the pain in some way--do something to it. Be the pain again and respond.

Establish a back-and-forth dialogue with your pain. Find out from it what it wants from you, why it is hurting you, what it is trying to tell you, whether it is angry at you, how it is helping you, how you are dependent on it and for whom it is a spokespain.

When you reach closure of some sort, exit the pain's area and return outside your body. Walk up to this page. Look down right here at the words "clonal reintegration process" and feel yourself reabsorbing your little clone and the knowledge the little one gained within.

* Evaluate (using your experience "dialoging with your pain” the existential idea that your physical pain stimulates you to grow.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

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Existential Review (Pt 5) PHENOMENOLOGICAL SELF-DISCLOSURE by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com

2008-12-09T18:08:36Z

Existential Review (Pt 5) PHENOMENOLOGICAL SELF-DISCLOSURE by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first 4 lessons,
continue the exploration of the existential model with Ideal 5. Share your reactions to the existential explorations and let others benefit from your explorations.

You, too, Mickey, could grow by doing these exercises.

EXPERIENCE PHENOMENOLOGICAL SELF-DISCLOSURE Experience Your Ever-developing Self-sense as an Individual & as Humanity (Ideal 4)
Become ever more aware of your personal truth by consciously experiencing and then suspending your prejudgments and assumptions by owning your experience as your creation and by reflecting on your life. Koestenbaum explains this ideal as follows, "I am excited at the thought of both therapy and philosophy. I look forward to exploring the person that I am. I anticipate with pleasure examining my feelings and attitudes. I want to study my personality and my body. I am also determined to understand the philosophical nature of man. I recognize the importance of questions regarding human destiny and about the meaning of life. I also appreciate the significance of morality. I consider these questions fundamental to a free and healthy life. [op cit, page 512]
The most profound thing I’m currently learning about my self is... Finish that thought for yourself right now. Your answer’s part of your confluent exploration of the existential proposition that self-disclosure is valuable to you.

Disclose Your Mission to Yourself [Based on Frankl, V., The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, New York: Vintage, 1973.]
One form of self-disclosure is finding your lifework, your purpose in life. Victor Frankl says your "life is meant to be lived for a specific purpose" and your most burning desire "is to discover this purpose, this meaning," in your life. Frankl says your larger goals and commitments, the people and principles you live for (rather than just personal power, recognition and comfort) are what give you real fulfillment in life. When you keep your life purpose and your search for it in mind, you get the fulfilling sense of serving a larger cause. Focus on future goals in a way that allows you to put your present upheavals in perspective.

Your Higher Purpose
Have a large piece of paper and an assortment of crayons ready. Close your eyes. Center yourself.
Imagine you are able to look down on the landscape of your life history from the perspective of your internal logotherapist. See all the paths you have taken, road blocks, detours, adventures along the road. From your Olympian perspective, simultaneously contemplate the physical, emotional, intellectual, social, ecological and spiritual regions through which you as a pilgrim on the lifepath to your higher purpose have passed.
You have ascended the foothills and are now at the base of a great mountain, symbolizing your highest purpose. Notice the clearing in which you now stand--your present existence. Fully comprehend all your unique shaping, inspiring and conditioning experiences. See your experiences and movements in life as all preparing you to climb the mountain and fulfill your purpose, meaning, mission and destiny in life. Imagine that all factors in the past and present have brought you to this place in the clearing on the foothills at the base of the mountain.
Look at the sign marking your path up the mountain. The sign has your name on it. Imagine that there are a dozen or so great things waiting to be created by you as you climb. You are the only one who can make it up this path and achieve these creations. As you look up the path, receive visions of these creations.
Draw your lifepath (show: your past, present and projected future.) "Indicate the inputs leading to the clarity you now have about your path and the creations you will actualize in your upward journey. Label the regions, markers and travel conditions and destinations. Put your drawing on your wall at home or work for one week. Look at-it daily.

* What did you learn from making and contemplating this map?

* What specific creations did you imagine yourself manifesting?

* What’s your life purpose and meaning?

Review: The Existential Principles:

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.
Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.
Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)
Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.
Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.
Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)
Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)
Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.
Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.
Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.
Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.
LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable
Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

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Existential Life Review (Pt 4) BE RESPONSIBLE, CHOOSE YOUR REACTIONS by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com

2008-12-09T15:51:44Z

Existential Life Review (Pt 4) BE RESPONSIBLE, CHOOSE YOUR REACTIONS by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@aol.com 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in the first 3 lessons,
continue the exploration of the existential model of being starting with Ideal 3: Be Responsible, Choose Your Reactions. Enrich this site by sharing your responses here.

Be Responsible, Choose Your Reactions

Koestenbaum's third existential ideal indicates you need to recognize that you’re choosing your life. You choose your attitudes and reactions to the thrown aspects of your life (sex, birth order, family, geography at birth, etc.). You choose your growth path, your obstacles and your inevitable individual death. In Koestenbaum's words, "I have created and am responsible for the organization of my world. I did not create the raw materials, but am fully and alone responsible for the social reality I have constructed around me and the life-style that I have created for myself. I am in charge of my life. I help shape the world. I fulfill my obligations." [Koestenbaum, P., op cit, p 512] Koestenbaum calls this principle "responsibility."

Archetypical Decision for Finitude

*Imagine you are being born again. This time you have at birth all knowledge you now have about your life and it's Limitations. Decide firmly and wholeheartedly to be born the person you are, to the parents you had, in the time, place and circumstances of your actual birth. Accept your conscious decision to be the individual you are.

Ground the ideal of responsibility in your experience by the following:
*Recall and write of a time in your life when you realized that something (for which you had been blaming others) was being perpetuated by your own attitudes and behaviors.

* Here’s five events in your life I easily accept responsibility for ... (complete).

* Here’s five events in your life I find it hard to accept responsibility for ... (complete).

* Here’s the positive results I’d gain if I took responsibility for what I found it hard to accept as my choices.

* Three times, loud and clear, say, “I wholeheartedly choose to born who, where and what I was and all the experiences I have which make me as I am.”

Take Responsibility for Obstacles

Deepen your sense of responsibility by the following expansion of Koestenbaum's strategy for taking responsibility for your problems, obstacles, hang-ups and anxieties.

Read each of these statements aloud with full authority; then make a checkmark after each.
"There are answers to life's problems.

We find meaning and joy in searching for these answers. Every obstacle turned over is a stepping stone."
Think of a problem which you have. Imagine you’ll put up obstacles to solving this problem. Note what obstacles you choose. Next, read the following aloud, indicating by checkmark that you have done so. "I have a problem because I FORGOT I EXIST and because I FORGOT I AM A FREEDOM. I chose this problem to remind me I EXIST and to remind me I AM A FREEDOM." (check)

* What denied parts of you do the blocks you created express? How does seeing your choice of obstacles free you more? “Seeing how I create [the obstacles you create] frees me because (finish).

* Write (on ten separate scraps of paper) ten traits which characterize you. Think about each trait, one at a time, and how having each affects your life. Take full responsibility for constituting yourself with these traits.

Notice opposite self-constitutions you deny by attachment to traits you choose.

Select any traits you no longer wish and., one-by-one, burn the papers with words for the traits you’ll quit. Disidentify with each trait as the word paper burn.

*Which traits did you burn? How does this exercise relate to the existential ideal that you’re responsible for your attitudes and reactions?

* Write ten rules of how you should be. Cross out the traits you choose not to live from. Add other rules you do choose.

Review: The Existential Principles:

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.
Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.
Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)
Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.
Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.
Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE)
Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment.)
Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.
Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.
Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.
Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.
LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable
Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportunities to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS. leading to further growth.

sashalessinphd@aol.com

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Existential Life Review (Pt 3) EXPERIENCE YOURSELF AT SEVERAL LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

2008-12-08T20:11:09Z

EXISTENTIAL LIFE REVIEW (Part 3) an online e-course for you
Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@... 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in Lesson 1-
3, continue the exploration of the existential model of being
starting with Ideal 3: EXPERIENCE YOURSELF AT SEVERAL LEVELS OF
CONSCIOUSNESS

EXPERIENCE YOURSELF AT SEVERAL LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS Ideal 2

While you and what you perceive always imply each other, you
can also think about the "you" part of the you-object relationship.

When you think about yourself as an object, you detatch by
degrees from the objective world of things by reflecting. You
mentally step back from your problems, reflect on them and use them
to gain deeper wisdom, centering, freedom of choice and effective
action.

Progressively reflection your body, your reasoning about your
reflection on your body, your observation of yourself as a reasoner,
your reflection with your mate on you as an individual, your primary
group's reflection on you-two as a couple, your secondary group's
reflection on your primary group, humanity's reflection on your
secondary groups as part of all human culture, your reflection as
part of nature on humanity and your reflection from infinite space
and timelessness on nature. This sequence of reflections represents
successive detachments from the objective pole of the subjective-
objective continuum.. It is useful, in addition, to begin reflection
beyond the animal level at the level of your subpersonalities
[Assagioli, R., Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and
Techniques, New York: Penguin, 1976; Wilber, K., The Spectrum of
Consciousness, Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977; The
Atman Project, Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing, 1980. Wilber, K., No
Boundary, Boulder: Shambala, 1981; The Holographic Paradigm and
Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science, Boulder:
Shambala, 1982.]

At each successively more inclusive and encompassing level of
self- identity, you identify with (say "This is who I am") previously
unrecognized parts of yourself which you had defined as alien to your
self, projected into the objective realm and opposed as threatening
to your narrower self-concept. You thus become one with what you had
opposed and recognize your wider consciousness resulting from the now
unblocked communication among your once-alienated facets.

You lose nothing by such consciousness expansion. You still
have the capacities and abilities of your narrower self-facets as
alternate identities. You are just no longer trapped in the more
limited identifications.

In addition, communication among the attributes at any level
of self-identification is synergistic--more than a mere addition of
attributes. Unblocked communication allows novel interactions,
fluctuations in self-organization and the reorganization which
constitutes your next, broader level of self- recognition. Wider
levels of self-definition add novel attributes of their own and
confrontations with the higher-order dualisms (self versus nonself).
At the level of unity consciousness, the subject-object dichotomy
dissolves entirely and you are one with the unbroken, seamless,
continuous reality of the universe.

THE HIERARCHY OF SELF-DEFINITION

[Based on Koestenbaum, The New Image of a Person, 1978, page 78;
and Wilber, K., The Atman Project,., 1980, page 4. ]

PRESELF, PREDIFFERENTIATED ANIMAL SUBCONSCIOUS

When you were in your mother's uterus, you lacked a sense of self,
according to Wilber. You were timelessly embedded in physical matter,
desire- less and choiceless. You developed a sense of being different
from what was outside your body after you were born. You were
dominated by your physiology, particularly your reptilian (or brain
stem) reflexes, including survival fear. You were nonreflective;
lacking reflection, you lacked a self.4

PREVERBAL BODYSELF

From your fourth to seventh month after birth, you
experienced yourself as something that did not disappear when you
looked away. You recognized objects, like mommy and breast, but only
when they were physically present with you. Your emotions were
restricted to "rage, fear, tension, appetite and satisfaction or
simple pleasure"--only those emotions that could be quickly
discharged in the simple present you lived in. You were most
concerned with your moment-to-moment survival. You identified with
your body, which you distinguished from objects that did not give you
internal feedback when you bit them.

Remind yourself of what the world looked like to you in your
earliest months by reclining and performing the following experiment.

* Close your eyes.. Rotate your head slowly into each
possible position, opening your eyes a second after each exhale, then
close them. Imagine that each time you close your eyes, all you had
seen disappeared, with no visual image. Each time you open your
eyes, you see a novel world. Experience new emotional reactions to
each scene you view, with no emotional carry-over to the next.

Bite a nearby object. Then bite your thumb. The parts that
hurt when you bite them are your self-identity at this stage. Check
here when you complete this experiment.

At seven months or so, you developed the ability to make
pictures for yourself. Your sense of your self was the pictures you
made of your body and its organs. Now you could also make pictures
of mommy, breast, and other objects which related directly to your
body needs; you frightened and comforted yourself with these pictures
when mommy and breast were physically absent. You thus put yourself
in a time frame longer than the immediate present. Your emotions
could thus be prolonged with the pictures you made. Your limbic
(paleomammalian, emotional) brain was able thereby to sustain
influence over your reptilian brain, which had dominated your preself.

* Review this primary picturing process. Close your eyes.
Imagine you're hungry and picture your mother's breast or a bottle.
Now imagine you are cold and picture large arms holding and warming
you. Now imagine you're scared and envision a big person lifting you
out of the frightening situation. Imagine you're angry and fantasize
eating mommy up. Imagine other simple emotions you have at this age
and the infantile mental pictures which go with these emotions.
Picture your infant body as "good me." Picture it as "bad me." This
is your self-image at this stage.

PROTOVERBAL SELF

Between your first and second year of life, you began
learning the verbal labels of objects and simple abstract concepts,
such as defecating where your parents approved. You began your
membership in your language community by learning labels. You
learned your infant name and the words others used to designate you
(e.g., "baby," "little sister".) You were still unable to create
grammatically connected sentences and you confused the words you used
for objects with the objects themselves. You were able, for the
first time, to create temporal sequences for yourself, using words.
Your self-concept became your name, the words that you learned which
designate and were associated with you. Your inchoate sense of past
and future, with its implied possibility of your non-being, gave rise
to nightmares.

* Recall your protoverbal, linguistic membership self:
mentally regress and say the words and names you and others applied
to you when you were 18 months old. Say the words aloud in a high,
childlike voice. .Say "Mommy," "Daddy," "food," "more" and "no!" in
your native language. Think of yourself as little, needing to
urinate, and needing adult help. Tell your catetaker this in pre-
grammatical form (e.g., "Mommy! potty").

* Recall and relate your earliest nightmare.

As you learn to relate to yourself in language, you become
all the things your parents (and others and then you) say to yourself
about yourself. You learn certain social roles that you can fill to
interact smoothly with others. You hide or forget other roles and
dialogues about who you are. Each of your personality facets need
recognition, acceptance, expression and cooperation for you to expand
your self-concept further.

Fantasy, Preview of Broader Levels of Consciousness (Self-Concepts)

Have someone read these directions to you. Otherwise, read
these directions, then close your eyes and engage in the fantasy
indicated.

Sit comfortably. Breathe deeply.

Imagine yourself in front of the consciousness oscillator.
The mode selector above the screen reads Personality Facets, Inner
Voices, Subselves.

In succession, the screen shows you as you appear when you
are the way you like to be, the way you are with people you do not
know, you at your worst, the you that seldom emerges, the you that
takes over your personality when you are angry, and each of your
particular subpersonalities and distinctive ways of being in
different situations. As you view the screened visages of your
subselves, you feel the emotional states and hear the characteristic
voices you experience with each. The camera pans your subs as they
enter a large spacecraft shaped like your head.

The mode selector changes to "personality integration." Your
subs man and woman the various stations on the spaceship--some work
on the engine; some plot courses; another steers; one cooks; one
works the radio. All cooperate. The camera moves back to an
overview of the head-shaped space- craft. See that all your
subpersonalities are ultimately part of a single head-space, a single
vehicle moving and moved by all your subs working together. You hear
the choir for multiplicity of your voices blended as they sing
together in your head.

The mode selector above the consciousness oscillator screen
switches to Bodymind.

The screen shows your spacecraft landing atop a headcraft
platform, shaped as a giant replica of your body from the neck down.
As the head-shaped vehicle of your personality settles into its home
body, the whole unit you are becomes animated. On the screen, you
stroll over to a grassy knoll and lie down. You gesture to your
viewer to do likewise.

Lie down and breathe very deeply with your image on the
screen. Let the air push your belly out with each deep inhalation.
Imagine you draw vital force into your mouth and all the way down to
your belly. As you breathe out, imagine you radiate this force
through your body. Let all thoughts dissolve and pass to infinity as
you exhale. If you feel tense areas in your body, tighten them more.
Imagine what emotion you may be holding in by these tensions and then
allow yourself to release emotions and relax the tensions.

Experience your integrated bodymind. [Assagioli, R., 1976,
Psychosynthesis: A Manual of Principles and Techniques; Wilber, K.,
198.1, op.cit.]

Get up and go back to the oscillator. The mode selection
switches to Dyad.

The screen shows the person who you feel (or have felt) the
closest to in your life walking over to you as you recline on the
grassy knoll. She or he takes your hands and looks deeply into your
eyes, and you relive the feeling of being connected with her or him.
You know she or he knows how you feel, cares about your welfare and
growth and lets her/himself to learn from you.

You likewise know, care and learn from him or her. Notice
your common consciousness, your feeling of unity, your dyadic level
of self.

Primary Groups flashes above the screen, and your family,
gang at work, recreation buddies and other intimate, face-to-face
intimates parade across the screen.

The image returns to your household. See you and all of your
housemates interacting in your yard. As you see an aerial view of
your household in its neighborhood your feeling of oneness with your
family becomes salient.

Social Network flashes, and you see all your friends,
relatives, supporters and personal allies coming over for a network
meeting in your yard. The friends and relatives of each of the
members of your household and family also gather. This is your
social network.

Institutional Consciousness appears as the screen shows the
school, the company, the clubs and other institutions to which you
belong. With each institution shown, an organizational chart
appears, showing the formal structure by which the institution
supposedly operates.

The mode selector indicates Developmental Stages, and you see
yourself at different stages of your life-cycle, those through which
you have already passed, your current stage and those to come. See
yourself adding years of life and passing through stages where you
successively develop trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity,
intimacy, generativity and integrity. The screen shows you getting
into the adult world, living through early adult crises, settling
down and becoming your own person. It shows your midlife crisis,
renaissance, awareness of your mortality, and your late blooming.

Finally, it shows your denial of, anger at, bargaining with,
depression from, and then acceptance of death. You see and hear
yourself at each stage of your development. You experience yourself
as different at each stage; you also feel continuity as you move
through the entire cycle.

Community See your neighborhood, town and city on the
screen. Feel your oneness with this level of awareness.

Culture is the next level. See the various ethnic groups in
the world, including your own. Notice the differences in language,
customs, art, morals and habits of each cultural group. Be aware of
your cultural level of consciousness.

Humanity The screen sweeps before you the panorama of human
forms, colors, dwelling scenes, and activities. T he audio surrounds
you with a sea of human voices, spoken in every tongue, in every way.
You experience your under- lying oneness with-all people.

The consciousness oscillator shifts into the hypnopedagogical
mode. You become one with all humanity. As Humanity, the different
cultures, nations and ethnic groups are like your subpersonalities.
The oscillator tells you to be aware of your existence as Humanity.
You intuit, as the beneficent spirit of humanity, your true needs at
this time. You have valuable advice to give to your
subpersonalities, the diverse people of the world, who are your
parts. Tell them, Humanity.

Still in the hypnopedagogical mode, the oscillator flashes
Ecological Consciousness on the screen.

You become Eartha, the spirit of the Earth personified. You
are the whole earth. Get up and let yourself move as Eartha.

As Eartha, tell your constituent, Humanity, how you view her
performance among the other creatures in terms of your ecology.

Finally, the oscillator flashes Unity Consciousness and the
screen shows your peak, ecstatic, mystical or religious experiences,
where you are with every aspect of the entire hierarchy and your
timeless, spaceless identity in the various levels of yourself.

* Relate the thought and feelings you experienced, as you
engaged in the fantasy above, to the notion that accepting the higher-
order unity of apparent opposites expands your consciousness, or
self.

SUBSELF AND PERSONALITY: SYNERGIZING THE VOICES WITHIN

For you to become into an integrated, fully functioning
person, you need to recognize, accept, coordinate, integrate and
synergize the diverse aspects of your personality. These are the
subpersonalities you viewed in the consciousness oscillator, as well
as others of whom you are now becoming aware. [Vargiu,
J., "Psychosynthesis Workbook," Synthesis, Vol. 1, 1974. ]

Within you reside a society peopled by your ways of being in the
world. Your particular complement of inner voices unique to you.
You also likely have subselves. Your subselves include
personifications of your four functional brains (brainstem, limbic,
right and left cerebral hemispheres), internalized parents
(nurturing, critical, etc.), manipulative styles (placating, blaming,
etc.), internalized children (negative, playful, etc.), criticalness
and defensiveness, panhuman archetypes (hero, the beautiful one,
etc.) and higher transpersonal levels.

As a sample of such synergistic subself dialectic, create a
group of four friends for the exercise below.

PERSONA AND SHADOW INTEGRATE AS DAIMON

*Ground the subself, inner voice level of awareness in the
exercise for this section. In this exercise, you'll imagine You-At-
Your-Best meets You-At-Your-Worst. What are you like as Best You?
As Worst You? You reflect on each.

When you listen to your inner voices and coordinate their
expression, you gain possibilities, creativity and synergy. When you
meet and integrate your voices you save your self-sense from
shrinking to the attributes of any single voice (persona). You stop--
when you appreciate all your voices--imagining other people are like
you deny you are.

Repressed voices (your shadow) grow from basic (daimonic)
urges (like sex, anger, craving for power) that can dominate you.
Your daimonic force--a force both destructive and creative--becomes
your evil shadow, denied as a part of you.

Repressing your shadow makes you feel apathetic for awhile.
Your shadow, however, eventually builds up energy and overwhelms your
all your other voices. Then you express your daimon, Mr. Hyde turned
loose, without regard to how your expression affects other parts of
your life or other people.

Rollo May advocates synergizing energy you waste repressing
your shadow (and opposing other people who personify it). Confront
your shadow and encounter your own daimonic energy. Establish a
dialectical, mutually growthful dialogue with it. Be it. Integrate
it with the rest of what you are. Experience increased energy. Play
with a two-armed daimon rather than a one-armed shadow and a one-
armed persona.

See and enjoy the unity of your persona and your shadow and
you raise You vault from the subself level of consciousness to the
integrated personality level.

Rene Tillich taught me the next exercise. It stimulates
subself synergy for your daimon. It is best done with groups of
partners, but you can do it with one partner or alone in fantasy.

INTEGRATE YOUR DAIMON

Choose as a partner one of the three people in this
experiment. Sit facing your partner.

Relive the worst thing you ever did. Imagine what it might
be like to share this with your partner.

Tell (or conceal from) your partner the worst thing you ever
did or the way you were that you regret most. Your partner listens
and says, "Thank you," when you finish. Reverse roles.

Invite your partner to share her worst thing or biggest
regret.

Discuss what you dislike about yourselves. Tell each other
the things you cannot stand about others.

Discuss the probable characteristics of your shadow, elements
revealed your regrets, worst behavior, disliked traits and parts of
others you dislike. Work out a character description of your shadow.

Join the other pair of partners in a group circle. Reflect
aloud on your shadows. Become your shadows. Each of you play-act
your shadows. One by one, you and the others say your shadow names
and state your existences. Say what you're like.

Stay in your role as shadow after you have introduced
yourself. Interact with the other shadows from your shadow
existence. Move about the room as shadows. Stay in character, even
ham it up--exaggerate it a bit. Feel the daimonic energy moving
through you.

Join a new partner. Tell this partner, as shadow, what you
want. Be as unreasonable and demanding as you secretly imagined you
never could.

Your partner asks you why you want what you want. S/he
interviews you and you respond till you get in touch with what you
really need, what motivates your wants. Reverse roles, so your
partner has a turn finding out what motivates her shadow's demands.

Now become persona, the personified opposite of your shadow.
State your existence as persona. As persona, address shadow. Tell
shadow how you feel toward her or him.

Become shadow again and respond to persona. Carry on a
dialogue between your shadow and your persona, playing both parts,
and shifting roles when your partner says. Let your persona and
shadow dialogue their resentments, demands, withholds, unfinished
business and appreciations to each other.

Center yourself. Imagine you are the Fair Witness within.
Stand facing your persona and your shadow. You have clear
reflection, compassionate neutrality and loving truthfulness in your
voice. Advise your persona and shadow on their relationship. Speak
aloud so all present may also hear. Each person in the group takes a
turn enacting her or his Fair Witness.

Now become your Daimon. As Daimon, the combined energy of
shadow and persona, move through the room with the energy of both.
Make sounds of how you feel. Let the sound and movement develop.
Interact with the other daimons. Express your power and exuberance.

Then sit with the rest of the group in a circle again and
discuss your experience.

* What. did you learn from the exercise about synergizing
your persona and shadow to the consciousness level of integrated
personality?

Who are you, the one who knows and controls your inner voices
and owns all your projections? You're the consciousness at the next
level of consciousness--an integrated personality. You change from a
self identified alternately with limited subselves to a more
comprehensive self, one that includes the subs as parts. As a
person, your task is to experience yourself as a co-part of a larger
self which exists in timeless moments with your body.

BODYMIND: LEVEL OF INTEGRATED ORGANISMIC FUNCTIONING

When you function as an integrated personality, you are
conscious of yourself inhabiting a body. You inhabit it rather than
considering it to be part of you, according to Wilber, because your
body has socially inhibited emotions in it and because it will die.
These feelings are held in as you unconsciously tense your muscles
into energy blocks. Accepting mind and body as one creates
synergistic communication to expand your consciousness to still more
inclusive levels. For such synergy, "embody your mind and mind your
body."

The exercises to follow are designed to heighten bodymind
dialectic and synthesis. Select a partner for these exercises.

Breathe Deeply and Become One With Your Bodymind

Lie down on your back. Breathe deeply and easily. Keep
noticing your breath until thought ceases and you feel pleasure
taking in and releasing energy to and from each part of your body.

History of Your Body and Your Relationship To It

Reflect on the history of you as a physical being, from
conception to your present size, health and physical abilities.
Notice your physical developments (size, weight, acquisition of
secondary sexual characteristics, etc.), illnesses, accidents,
problems, sports, operations, physical activities and substance
addictions in each stage of your life. Notice your body's changes in
appearance, health, sports and skills from birth to now. Tell your
partner your attitudes and reactions in your bodily existence at each
stage.

Imagine you are looking into a pond, meditating on your body
and the development of the consciousness which you are within your
body. Images which stand for the relationship of your body and your
consciousness appear in the waters of the pond. Share these images
with your partner.

Gestalt Dialogue With Your Body

State your existence as the consciousness embodied in your
body. As your consciousness, talk to your body about your relation
to it.

Become your body and reply to your consciousness.

Establish a dialogue, alternately becoming and speaking as
your body and then your consciousness, as your partner directs you.

Reverse roles and take your partner through this exercise.

BODY ACCEPTANCE

Tell your partner which parts of your body you like least.

Imagine that you are actually one of these parts of your
body. As this part of your body, describe yourself. What, as this
part, is your existence like? Begin with, "I am ... (your first
name)'s ... (fill in the body part), and I would describe my
existence as..." (complete.)

Stay in your role as your least-liked body part, talk to the
person whose body you are part of about your relationship. Begin
with "As your ... (fill in this with your least-liked body part) I
want to tell you the following about the way we interact..."

Now be yourself and reply to your least-liked body part.
Dialogue, shifting roles, as in a play, at the direction of your
partner.

Now take your partner through the sequence.

Both you and your partner embody and enact your centaur
(Wilber's term for your personified bodymind). Get up. Close your
eyes. Experience your breath. Feel your space. Let impulses of
movement and rest move you. Move spontaneously and interact
physically without talking and with your eyes closed. Add sounds
(but not words) to your movement. In movement and sound express your
being as centaur.

* What I became aware of, at my bodymind level of self (as I did the
breathing body history, dialogue and centaur dance) is... (complete.)

* Draw a picture of your body. Indicate which of the sentences below
are true of your drawing:

a. you have created a fairly objective rendition of your
external appearance;

b. you spent more time drawing your face, hands (or other
part) than you spent drawing still other parts of your body;

c. what you left out or overemphasized in your drawing
corresponds to equivalent ways you are in your life;

d. recent changes in your body may be absent in your
drawing due to lagging behavioral bonds with the world;

e. if you draw your head and body as separated, you are
probably split between mind and body in your life;

f. your drawing emphasizes parts of your body that qualify
you as attractive to others--shape, hair, facial features as well as
parts you use to deal with the world, like your hands, eyes and
mouth;

g. your drawing, a manifestation of your self-image, is
built up around those parts which have a special relation to people
and objects in your world;

h. parts of your drawing are more prominent, shade

d or marked off with heavier lines, proving your body image is not
an objective record of externally observable reality;

i. there is a correspondence between the way you place your
drawing on the page, how much room you take up with your drawing and
your lived-space.

* Discuss the relation between your self-drawing and you
lived-space.

When you accept yourself as a personality (the "mind" in
bodymind) and as a body, you no longer project your non-accepted
physicality inward as muscular tension nor do you project your
subselves onto others or the environment. You accept yourself, a
bodymind, as you are. This capability is the result of "Synergistic
communication between your personality and your body. You have the
perceptiveness, competence and sense of identity that allows you to
expand your consciousness to the next level of consciousness dyadic.

DYADIC SYNERGY: COMMUNICATION BETWEEN CENTAURS

When you open totally yourself to a reciprocally vulnerable
person, you receive feedback that lets you grow. From the
perspective of a shared consciousness with another person, you can
reflect upon your bodymind. You've transcended your level of
consciousness from a single bodymind to a human couple. The two of
you together have more good energy than the sum of what each of you
had as single bodyminds.

The Cybernetic, Dyadic Growth Helix [Based on Hampden-Turner, C.,
Radical Man, London: Duckworth, 1981.]

Assess the degree to which your closest human relationships
are synergistic, suggests Hampden-Turner, ask yourself if you're
getting more alive, tolerant, helpful–expanding your consciousness
from relating with your significant other. Or are you stagnating,
becoming narrower, angry, frustrated and alienated?

Relating intimately to another is your opportunity to uplevel
your consciousness to the dyadic level or to fail to make growthful
contact and narrow your sense of yourself to the consciousness of an
isolated bodymind.

Your growth and actualization in the dyad depend, according
to Hampden-Turner, on a cybernetic growth cycle. In a cybernetic
growth cycle, you develop your own judgment, competence and
individuality and actively show your developing self to your other,
who lovingly yet honestly shares her or his reactions. If you
maturely use this feedback, you raise your consciousness, making
yourself able to perceive with greater clarity, develop your
individuality further and make better choices. The key to growth is
committing yourself to someone whom you accept, lovingly challenge
and who enhances you. You risk your vulnerability with the person
you commit yourself to that person could reject or accept you and
your growth. You choose to stop insisting on always seeing things
your way and open yourself to your other's opinions. You let
yourself care about her or his development. You learn from each
other, cooperate, and make ever-more growthful life choices, based on
the loving energy you share. A growthful cybernetic cycle with your
other uplevels your sophistication because you learn from her or his
experience and feedback.

Your growth simultaneously contributes to your other's
growth. As you become more mature from her or his feedback, you are
capable of giving her or him the greater love, acceptance,
cooperation and feedback she or he needs for her or his growth.

Each time you and your other go through the cycle of choice,
commitment, vulnerability, encouragement of each other's development,
synergistic learning and use of each other's reactions, you both
raise your consciousness.

Commit yourself. Get honest with your loved one. Learn from
her or him and keep getting higher.

Synerge With Your Significant Other

The following is a cue sequence for enhancing synergistic
communication between you and your significant other. Allow
yourselves at least one private, uninterrupted hour to both go
through the cycle.8 Sit facing each other, holding hands and
maintaining eye contact.

I choose to relate to you as follows (tell her or him) ....

I perceive these patterns in our interaction ...(specify).

Inside, who I think I am with you is ....

Five of my successes relating to you are ....

I can be authentic and caring with you when I use my
following abilities ....
These are the ways I commit myself to you ...(specify them).

I drop my assumptions, letting you influence my attitudes and
beliefs when ....

I bridge the distance and make contact you feel when ....

You bridge the distance and make contact I feel when I feel
recognized, known and encouraged by you when ....

I rise above my narrower personal concerns and identify with
your growth when I ....

I feel you transcending yourself to care about me when ....

From our dialectical confrontation, I learned ....

from it, I'm now learning ....

You learned (and are learning) in our ongoing struggle over
the different ways we perceive things that ....

We can synergize these issues ... (specify).

We've already synergized ...(specify).

We've met each other, dialogued and grown these ways ....

Grow With Feedback

To the degree that's right for you at this time, tell your
significant other the demands, resentments, appreciations, withheld
information, unfinished business, unsynergized issues, unexpressed
feelings and thoughts (negative and positive) for her or him.
Encourage your other to likewise express her or his demands,
resentments, appreciations, etc., toward you.

Personify Your Relationship

My existence, as the dyadic relationship of (your
name) and (other's name) is ... (describe what you, as
dyad, are like).

* Use your experience in the exercises above to discuss the
validity of the hypothesis that dyadic consciousness (the extension
of your definition of yourself to include another) leads to synergy.

Feeling Dyadic Consciousness Dissolves Illusions of Separateness
Sit with a partner. Maintain eye contact. Don't touch.
Tell her or him, "I feel separateness from you when I say to
myself ... (specify all of the rational and irrational, serious and
trivial, crazy and stupid and clear and astute things you say to
yourself that make you feel separate from her or him.) Exhaust your
list.

Your partner sits calmly and says, "Thank you" after each
separation you enumerate.

Then have your partner tell you, "I feel separateness from you when I
say to myself...." Encourage your partner to exhaust her or his
separatenesses: calmly say "Thank you" for each.

Then join hands. Tell your partner, "I feel oneness with you
when I tell myself ... (complete with all the things you tell
yourself which make you feel close to your partner..) Reverse roles.
Discuss your experience with this exercise.

When you raise your consciousness to the dyadic level you
still keep your bodymind awareness, your distinct personality and
your inner voices, should you choose to temporarily identify with
them.

When you and your significant other expand consciousness of
yourselves to internalize each others' wisdom and concerns, you are
on the dyadic level of consciousness. The energy, richness,
complexity and awareness the two of you share exceeds the sum of both
your individual bodymind energies and awarenesses. Your couple
synergy is enhanced when you use your relationship so each of you
grows and has more to give to the relationship as well.

Ken Keyes provides an excellent model for such synergistic
dyadic consciousness. [Keyes, K., Handbook to Higher Consciousness,
5th Edition,: Living Love, 1979 and A Conscious Person's Guide to
Relationships, Kentucky: Living Love, 1979.]

Keyes says to welcome upsets in your relationship. You can
use upsets to raise your consciousness. He suggests you fully share
your deepest feelings and process what you say to yourself which make
you feel separate from and opposed to one another. You can then
experience your oneness.

Relate compassionately, Keyes says, to your lover's problems
as signals for her or him to grow without also getting yourself
caught up emotionally. Process your own emotional upsets, feel
centered and loving and then act freely. Use your relationship to
stimulate internal dialogue at the personality levels of each of you,
so you can both raise your individual and mutual consciousness. When
you're upset, disturbed, unhappy or dissatisfied with your mate,
explore your own addictions, that is, how you tell yourself your
other must be and your relationship must be for you to be happy.
Such addictions trigger your upset. You stop suffering and instead
grow when you stop being addicted. Change your addictions to
preferences. Preferences are desires which, if not fulfilled, do not
make you suffer.

* What, in Keyes' framework, are addictions and preferences?

* What. does he mean when he says to upgrade your addictions
to preferences?

Think of an addiction of yours that involves someone with whom you
are in a relationship. Speculate on the form your addiction would
take if it were raised to a preference.

* Imagine that you've upleveled your addiction to a
preference. Imagine how your life would be affected. Tell me what
you imagine.

* Recall a time when your intimate's annoying habit or
attitude gave you an opportunity to discard an addiction and feel
better as a result. Write you results.

Stop blaming each other for not meeting each other's
expectations. Refrain from making addiction-based demands. Turn off
addictions; turn on love. Let your intimate express anger, jealousy
and other separating emotions aimed at you, while you love her or him
more no matter what she or he does. Let her or his addictions be
okay with you.

Realize that in disputes, you win some and lose some; that is
okay.

Make your growth and self-expression help your love's growth
as she or he defines it.

Before you enter a deep relationship with another, Keyes
invites you to know and accept your own inner voices, personality and
bodymind. Enter your relationship so you can cooperate with each
other in "the great adventure of life."

Keyes recommends you avoid using intense love as a basis for
involvement, since, at more inclusive levels of consciousness, you're
at living oneness and love with all humanity. You are already deeply
in love with everyone. Therefore, he says, choose carefully who you
share your time and life games with. Choose someone who contributes
to your well-being and vice versa.

"You contribute to your mutual well-being when you enjoy
the 'enoughness' that you do have in your life, and thus open your
heart to happiness by not creating emotion-backed demands for what
you don't have. Learn to emotion- ally accept what is here and now
in your life. You will find you always have 'enough' in your life."
Take responsibility, Keyes says, for creating your own
happiness in your relationship. You use your relationship to raise
your own consciousness only when you work on your own bodymind,
personality and subself integration. Keyes suggests such integration
allows you to be "in touch with the beautiful, capable and loving"
aspects of your own subdyadic consciousness as well as higher
consciousness. "I love you," means "You're mirroring me and letting
me see the beautiful, capable parts of me."

Make your relationship delightful by being involved and
sharing with your intimate, not by being addicted to your intimate
for your happiness. To increase your involvement, you must decrease
your addictions. Sharing means not hiding anything, so you can build
a trusting base.

"Ask for what you want, but don't be addicted to getting it."
Keep noticing the beauty and preciousness of the bodymind and
higher being your intimate is no matter what subpersonality she or he
is affecting.

Open to the form the relationship takes, which, for couples,
may be nonmonogamous.

You function at the dyadic level of consciousness when
you "discover the 'us' place in terms of surrender, compassionate
power and mutual give and take."

YOUR SELF EXPANDS TO PRIMARY GROUPS

Dyadic awareness, your sense of yourself as part of a pair
is, in turn, a component of larger-scale organizations of
individuals. The people you regularly interact with as bodymind on a
daily basis constitute your primary groups. You transcend the dyadic
level of consciousness when you see, hear and feel things from the
perspective of your entire family, fraternity or running gang. You
keep the dyadic, bodymind, personality and subself awareness you have
gained. You still use the capacities, awareness and sense of self
you developed at these narrower levels when you experience your
oneness with a primary group. As a conscious member of a primary
group, you share your couple, organismic and personality abilities in
a wider context, involving more people.

Family Health

[Based on Kelly, A., "Evaluating and Improving Family Health"
in The Holistic Health Handbook, Bauman, E., Brint, A., Piper, L.,
Wright, P., editors, Berkeley: And/Or Press, 1978.]
How healthy is your family and each of its members? The
health of each of you depends partly on how cohesive, supporting and
encouraging your family is.

Alta Kelly found certain factors to be critical to healthy
families. These factors are face-to-face contact, verbal and
nonverbal communication, touching, empathy, commitment, enrichment
and, for husband and wife, sexual compatibility. Consider how your
family does on each factor and what steps you can take to improve.
The first Family health factor is one-to-one, face-to-face
time spent together by each pair of family members. If you realize
some members of your family spend hardly any time together, improve
this by creating a natural way, like sharing a household task, for
them to tarry with each other.

The second family health factor is verbal communication.
Kelly says to let each other know what you are into each day. Talk
often with each other as a group and individually. Improve verbal
communication by sharing your daily concerns more with the family
member with whom you ordinarily speak least.

The third health factor is good nonverbal communication.
Tune into the physical cues, body postures and behavior of other
members of your family. This helps. you help them with their
health.

The fourth family health factor is touching. Infants and
older folks "can die from insufficient body contact" and touching is
essential to the well-being of every family member. Is there a
family member you have not hugged or patted today? Make physical
contact with them today.

Fifth, for family health, Kelly says, practice empathy.
Develop the ability to temporarily understand things from the
perspectives of the others in your family. If you or someone in your
family wants to develop your empathy, experiment by pretending you
are the other person and state her or his position.

Commitment, the sixth factor, is a key to family health,
according to Kelly. To optimize your family's health, you and each
of the family members need to accept the idea that your family is a
unit. Deepen your commitment by thinking of each member of your
family and specific ways you can support each and the family as a
whole.

Your family health is improved, finally, by what Kelly calls
the enrichment factor, encouraging the growth and vitality of each
person in the family. Think of how each person in your family, and
your family as a group, can advance toward their goals and higher
purposes this week. Do something to encourage this movement.
Kelly suggests you discuss your personal problems, concerns
and joys with the others in your family. Have time both with and
apart from your family. Create outings together. Laugh and cry
together. Be able to say "no," when appropriate, without guilt. Give
and get compliments. Listen to and think about each others'
constructive criticisms. And finally, share wellness education.
With attention to face-to-face contact, good communication,
touch, empathy, commitment and an emphasis on family enrichment, your
family helps you stay healthy and growing.

Family Fitness

* List at least ten strengths, good points and things you
tike about your household and your relationships in it. Tell a
partner, loudly and with great enthusiasm, "What I like about my
family is..." (share your household's good points.)

* Do you want to share loving feelings with ;your
housemates?

* Do you want to feel good with your family?

* Reread Kelly's suggestions (above), then select a ,small.
doable step to improve your household's activity, feeling,
expression, understanding and intimate contact. Report results.

NETWORK CONSCIOUSNESS
[based on Speck, R., "Social Network Intervention" in The
Psychotherapy Handbook, Hernik, R., editor, New York: Meridian,
1980. ]

You, your intimates, family, relatives, friends, peers and
neighbors are embedded in larger strings of high-information
exchanging relationships to form networks. When you activate a part
of your network and facilitate novel and intense interaction among
its members, a network, or tribal, level of common consciousness can
emerge. You let the broader perspective and multiple resources of
the network to sustain and support your growth, as well as the growth
of the other individuals, couples and primary groups which are its
parts.

Ross Speck and Carolyn Atteneave model network intervention
as a way to make your network visible, therapeutic and salient as a
level of consciousness. Their exercises take your network through
phases of retribalization, polarization, mobilization, resistence-
depression, breakthrough and exhaustion-elation.

Activate a Social Network

The exercise below convenes and perpetuates a social network--
yours, a peer's or a client's. Scale the instructions down to what
works for you; feel free to reduce the numbers of people on the team
and in the network.

The Team Team up with two to six confederates to co-
facilitate a networking experiment. Choose a multiperson household or
other primary group as the index group of the network you will
activate.

* The team I joined consists ... (list their names)

* (Name) is the ostensible leader to represent the
team to the network.

Initial Meeting with Index Household. Have your team meet
for one to two hours with the members of the household whose network
is to be activated. A few close friends of household members should
also be present at this initial meeting. Discuss the problems,
crises, issues and interests of the household members. Find those
issues of the index household which are most likely to involve its
network constructively (examples: raise money to send a member to
college, treat a drinking problem, plant a garden, find a job for a
member, have a wonderful time, share at deep levels, etc.) Select
the household's issues around which you will initiate network
discussion.

Make Lists. Have each member of the index household list all
her or his friends, relatives, pals at work or school, social
workers, athletic buddies, and others who care about her or him.
Create a support list for each house- hold member. Everyone on the
lists will have a direct link with one or more members of the index
household. Many on the list will lack direct links with others on the
list. The interstimulation from direct, collective con- tact of
those thus linked makes network activation synergistic.
Set a time and date to hold a three-hour meeting in a
comfortable, private place suitable for 40 to 60 people.

Call People Listed. Have each household member tell the
people on her or his list of the meeting and its purpose. Callers
should mention only the name of the leader. They should not even
allude to the existence of a facilitation team (for reasons to be
explained below).

Have the intervention team meet to plan strategy before the
network meets.

Team Spreads Into Network Before Opening Ritual. On the
evening of the first network meeting, team members come in separate
cars half an hour early. Get to know and help arrange the meeting
site and get acquainted with people as they arrive. Team members
should "set an example of friendly interest, open communication.' If
asked, identify yourself by name, and if pressed, by occupation and
professional role. If not asked, let people assume you are another
member of the network. Establish human contact with as many people
as possible. Don't get caught with the team standing grouped
together."

Leader's Speech and Retribalization Ritual. As leader, call
for silence, introduce yourself, and, for three minutes, outline the
problems and concerns of the index household and how this network
could help. Tell them to expect some work, led by activists who must
emerge and lead innovative tasks. The basic ground rule will be "no
secrets within the network." Tell them you will convene the network
three more evenings at two-week intervals, and they are expected to
attend, unless there are unusual circumstances. Convey a sense of
purpose, direction and enthusiasm.

Then have everyone stand and hum until a tune appears. Then
whoop, scream, and jump up and down for four minutes. Tell the
people to stop yelling and join hands and sway with your eyes
closed. As they sway, ave the members each say in one word how they
feel.

"The team scattered throughout the group stimulates,
initiates and pulls" reluctant people there to participate. "If the
response is halfhearted, the team must step up its tempo, and the
number of nonverbal exercises must be increased. Participation by
everyone must be demanded in a direct, confronting way until the
group is involved, or the network effect process will not get off the
ground."

When the retribalization phase has been successfully
completed, you have the networks attention and network members have
formed a bond by doing the rituals they shared.

Polarization. As leader, divide the group into two (or if
the group is very large, into three) concentric circles of people.
For the inner circle, choose ten or so of the most outgoing and
expressive people, who represent one side of an issue or cleavage in
the group, as regards the index house- hold's problems or concerns.
The inner group may represent a generational (younger vs. older),
sexual (men vs. women), class or topic-specific disagreement. The
outermost circle represents the opposing position. The middle group
is just that. Make sure team members are selected for each ring.
Place an empty chair in the middle of the inner circle.

When all are seated in the concentric circles, announce the
topic the inner circle will discuss. In announcing the topic,
accentuate the polarity surrounding it. Tell the inner group to
share something about themselves and each comment upon, then discuss
the topic "among themselves in the presence and the hearing of the
entire network." Team members in the inner circle encourage
discussion. "No one is allowed to escape from commentary, but no one
is purposely embarrassed."

Do not let members of the outer circle interrupt. Tell them
they too will get a chance for uninterrupted discussion. If someone
who is not in the inner circle wishes to speak, she sits on the empty
chair in the middle. When the person speaking before her finishes,
she may then say her piece. Then she must go back to the outer
circle and listen.

Each group gets its turn discussing the topic in the middle
while the others listen.

The deliberate polarization you bring out and exaggerate at
this phase increases the network's energy and starts to reveal who
the network's innate group leaders (activists) are. "The entire
network is forced to deal with multiple levels of concepts and
interpersonal relations."

Mobilization. As leader, end the concentric circles format,
restate the problems, tasks and resources of the network. Lead a
discussion designed to bring out the activists to help formulate
goals and plans and organize and lead support groups for each member
of the index household. Assign tasks to these support groups and
make sure everyone in the network has the activist-leaders' phone
numbers to exchange information between network meetings. End the
meeting and leave soon.

The team, committees and support groups meet, plan and
coordinate and their activities between network meetings.
Resistence-Depression/Breakthrough. The group will, in the
course of each meeting, cycle through depression and resistance,
especially when it realizes "the goals and tasks are not going to be
performed externally by the intervention team, but internally by the
network group themselves." Breakthrough is achieved when "volunteer
activists realize they have to mobilize in new ways and take hitherto
unrecognized factors into account" and this "leads into activity that
accomplishes the goals of the network members."

* Summarize the events and consequences of the network's
first meeting.

* What strategies do you and the team have for the two
remaining network meetings.

Exhaustion-Elation. You leave a network meeting tired but
confident the network can deal with its problems.

Subsequent Network Meetings. Begin each subsequent session
with the starting ritual. Follow this with the network news-
reporting committee work and sharing information. As the index family
gains closure on its presenting problem, allow new index people to
share their problems and become the focus of the networks attention.
End each meeting with simple refreshments.

At the last of the three network meetings, create a regular
opportunity for network gatherings. If you attend further meetings,
do so as a member, rather than the leader.

* Discuss the remaining network meetings and their cycling
though retribalization, polarization, mobilization,
resistence/depression, breakthrough and exhaustion/elation.

Discuss the emergence of the network level of consciousness
for yourself, the network created by your experiment, the index
household and for other members of the network.

YOUR EXISTENTIAL ENSEMBLE

Picture the people with whom you have to reckon. Imagine
these people, your existential ensemble, playing the score of your
existence on musical instruments. Listen to your song and experience
your emotions and sensations as you do. Describe your ensemble, its
playing and the score.

INSTITUTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Extension of your self-boundary to include institutions--
political, educational, occupational, etc., requires (as do all
levels within the hierarchy of consciousness) dialectical,
synergistic integration of apparently exclusive categories.
Your personal, group and company development depend on you
and the other people at your workplace growing past your roles,
status and the formal hierarchy. When you grow this way, you relate
as genuine human beings, able to share your feelings and thoughts
without fear of punishment.

HIERARCHY HURTS [Based on Rowen, J., Ordinary Ecstasy, London:
Routledge & Kegal Paul 1976. ]

When the formal hierarchy is used in an authoritarian, "shut-
up-and-listen-to-higher-ups" way, you do not relate genuinely and you
do not grow. You hurt; in turn, you withhold your creativity and
subvert the organization. Researchers have shown that if you are
working in such a heavy hierarchy, you are likely to have "increased
feelings of inadequacy, inability to express" yourself, "inability to
influence anyone, feelings of being shut out, increase in
cynicism, ... destructive feelings," feelings you must "dominate or
be dominated," feelings that "to conform is the best thing,... that
intolerance" and prejudice "is all right .... that new ideas must
come from the top" and that "there is-no way of communicating with
those at the top...those at the top see their jobs as interesting,
challenging...satisfying and engaging a lot of their personality and
skills. Those at the bottom ing and engaging, feel bored ...
fatalistic...frustrated and... little of them is involved in the
work."

Organizational Development: Management Reaches Out to Employees
Organizational Development (OD) is designed to crumble
hierarchies and allow people and their organizations to evolve in
consciousness and efficiency. Management hires an OD consultant to
improve those communications which demoralize people and cost the
company money. The consultant starts by listening to all the people
involved in the problem. Then, based on what she hears, she writes a
problem proposal.

On -the-job sensitivity training for personnel begins when
she gives her feedback to those whom she interviewed, assembled as a
group to hear her program. During the discussion of her program, she
encourages bringing conflicts into the open and cooperatively
developing a plan of further research, encounter groups, team-
building sessions and creativity training programs.

In the meetings that follow, the consultant helps the people
at work bring out their hidden agendas, felt emotions, personal feuds
and power struggles. She teaches workers and management how to
interact more effectively, express feelings authentically, increase
understanding and trust, eliminate wasteful competitiveness, develop
workable negotiating procedures and share responsibility.
The OD consultant trains management to encourage and
challenge the talent and motivation of the workforce by setting
up "an open, problem-solving climate,"making sure "knowledge and
competence go with the work," and making those closest to the
information responsible as possible for problem-solving and
decisions. She also trains management to build trust and to reward
cooperation and achievement of both organizational and human
betterment goals. She encourages management to "increase self-
control and self-direction for people within the organization."
Workers Reach Out to Employers; Initiate Synergistic Dialogue, Even
With Reluctant Management.

Rowen writes that you, as an employee, can democratize your
company, even if it's stuck in rigid hierarchy, and even if its top
management resists change.

Find allies or sympathizers on the management team; they can
favorably present your positions. Then select a small project at
work that is likely to succeed. Even while you are succeeding at the
project, avoid having a clearly defined spokesperson, lest management
fire that person.

Then "make some realistic demand" on the status level above
yours in the formal hierarchy. Patiently insist on your demand and
hold frequent meetings with other groups in the company, explaining
your strategy.

The critical time comes when your group succeeds and
management gives into you but doesn't want your successful challenge
of the hierarchy to set precedent for other groups in the company.
If you resist this co-optation, you've created a democratic,
dialectic alternative to the top-to-bottom-only formal structure.
Consolidate your democratic revolution–befriend the managers you
challenged. Encourage all at work to confront, discuss and work
through problems in ways that enhance them each, nourish their
collective welfare and advance the goals of the organization.

* To what degree is your workplace growth-promoting or
alienating ?

* How could your workplace be strengthened by employee
andl/or employer action to facilitate the growth of other people at
work, the growth oi the work units, growth of your company and the
growth oi the community? What could you personally do to strengthen
your work institution?

SUBCULTURE, ETHNIC GROUP; CLASS, SEXUAL CATEGORY

Among the most inclusive groupings at the sociological level
of conscious- ness, humanity's subcultures, with their embedded
institutions, customs and linguistic charts of reality each have
their unique contributions for a synergized humanity. To both enjoy
and go beyond the extension of your sense of self as a member of an
ethnic group, as working, middle or upper class or as a male or
female in a particular culture, first consciously identify with your
group's distinctness. Then accept the distinctness of other groups
and experience your commonality, care and concern with humanity as a
whole.

Sample this potential with several other people (if possible;
or by yourself, in fantasy).

Personify Your Group

Recall the history of your people (or class, or sexual
category). You may wish to consult photo albums, books or speak to
others to give you a feeling for your group and the lessons your
group has learned over time.

Imagine you are viewing and hearing a newsreel of the
struggles, challenges and experiences of your people, from their
earliest beginnings until the present. Allow yourself to
kinesthetically, emotionally be in touch with the changes and
continuities in your ethnic, class or sexual group's development.
Be aware of what you, as the personification of your group's
heritage and experience, have to contribute to humanity. Tell the
others what you are like, what you want, what you really need, and
what you have to give the species. Move about and, as the spirit of
your people, encounter and speak earnestly with the other ethnic,
class and sexual category representatives present.

* As the spirit of your group, state your existence, your
potential contribution to humanity and which apparent separations
from other groups you can synergize into higher-order cooperation.

THE HUMANITY LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS: ARCHETYPES
[Based on Wilber, K., The Spectrum of Consciousness, Wheaton:
Theosophical Publishing House, 1977.]

Archetypes are the pattern-possibilities and predispositions
you and all other people have to act out roles . Archetypes (like
the hero, the prophet, the mother, the wise one, the guardian and
others) are mere potentials or habits of mind. You give these
potentials their specific content (as the star quarterback in the
case of the hero, the economic forecaster for the prophet, etc.) from
elements of your actual life experience. When you do not realize you
are motivated by an archetypical pattern (as, for example, when you
follow a political leader who seems to be the hero, vanquishing those
you fear), you go on "automatic," and respond to what looks, sounds
and feels on the outside like your unrecognized internal archetype.
Since archetypes are common to whole cultures and all humanity, whole
nations unconsciously act out archetypical patterns (the judge, the
magician, etc.) If you deny your archetypes you see, hear and feel
the world from their perspectives.

When you become aware of your archetypes, you gain both their
power and their guidance. Reflect on your archetypes. Deliberately
identify with each one of them (for you have the potential for each
within you.) By deliberately identifying with archetypes, you become
consciously aware of how such formerly unconscious identifications
feel, sound and look. This awareness alerts you to the cues, when
they arise in daily life, that you're responding archetypically.
This awareness, in turn, allows you to choose to do so or not. You
can consciously use your full complement of archetypes to synergize
panhuman paradoxes to still broader levels of consciousness.

Archetypical symbols include the characters in mythology,
dream symbols, the gods of the Olympian pantheon (cupid, messenger,
etc.), the higher arcana of the tarot cards (fool, craftsperson,
hermit, the beautiful one, etc.), representatives of-your reptilian,
mammalian, holistic and analytic brains, and each level of
consciousness. Archetypes include shadow (repressed subselves),
reasoner (personality, centaur (bodymind), the lovers (dyad),
ancestors (family, ethnic group), anima (female tendencies), animus
(male tendencies), and many others.

PLAY WITH YOUR HERO ARCHETYPE

Based on Masters, R. & Houston, J., Mind Games: NY: Viking,
1972 and Campbell, J., Hero With a Thousand Faces, Cleveland:
Meridian, 1956.]

Seclude yourself comfortably in a sanctuary with a partner
(or prepared recording.) Create an uninterrupted hour for this
exercise. Assure one another of confidentiality.
Tell your partner to read the directions below slowly and
calmly to you and to read them in rhythm with your breath.
Sit up straight and comfortably on a cushion. Close your
eyes. Relax. Breathe deeply. With each breath, relax more. The
sound of my voice is calming to you.

Imagine you hear another voice, one you heard long ago,
perhaps from the once-upon-a-time, softly calling your name. Raise
your left thumb when you begin to hear the voice. If you do not hear
the voice, raise your right thumb. Good.

You are drawn by the voice or just by a strong impulse to an
image of a safe and private place, perhaps one you knew as a child.
You smell familiar, comforting aromas here. In the security of your
sanctuary is the secret door leading to the wondrous realm. See the
door. Reach out and open it. Hear its sound as it opens. Step out
onto the landing, at the top of the stairs. Grasp the rail and step
down onto the smooth wooden steps.

Descend the ten steps to the next landing. With each step
down, relax more deeply. With each step down, breathe more deeply.
Get in the boat at the landing at the bottom of the steps. Curl up on
the cushions on the bottom of the boat. Feel safe and drowsy. The
boat gently rocks back and forth as it drifts. Drift into the
reverie of the omnimythopoetic realm. Proceed into this realm to the
degree that it is in your best interest to do so.

Call to Adventure. Imagine you go or are lured or taken toward the
gate to adventure, which will expand your consciousness. Describe
the scene aloud in the present tense as it unfolds.

The Helper. Encounter, in your imagination, a creature or force who
will help you when you get to the guardian of the gate. Recount
aloud your meeting with your helper. Use the present tense.

The Guardian. Approach the gate and its guard. As you rivet your
attention on the''guardian, shift roles and become the guardian.
State your existence as guardian. Challenge the person approaching
the gate.

Tests Now become yourself and confront the guardian. Receive aid
from your helper.

Defeat or conciliate the guardian and go alive(or lose, die
and go dead) into the dark realm. Experience the sights, sounds,
feelings and actions of your encounter and describe them in the
present tense as they occur.

Supreme Ordeal. Experience and triumph in the greatest imaginable
test, here in the dark realm.

Boon. Gain your reward, take the boon.

Return. If you are blessed by the powers, go under their
protection. If not, flee, encounter obstacles. At the threshold,
leave behind the powers of the realm and re-emerge with your boon,
the elixir that can restore the world.

Find the place where the boat had drifted onto the beach. Get
in it. Lie down on the cushions. Fall deeply asleep. Become dimly
aware that the tide is rising and lifting and gently rocking your
boat. Know that you are safe as the boat drifts back to the
landing. Go up the steps now, one at a time, until you come to the
secret door. Pass through the door, through the sanctuary with your
partner.

Elixir. Now become the boon, the gift to the world you have brought
back.

* State your existence as Elixir. Tell humanity your
significance.

Become yourself again, deeply relaxed, seated on your
cushion. As I count from ten to one, you are becoming increasingly
alert. Remember any parts of this adventure which are in your own
best interest to remember; forget what you are not yet ready to
remember. Ten, nine, eight- becoming more alert. Seven, six, five,
four - getting ready to be wide awake. Three, feeling relaxed and
refreshed. Two, feeling alert and wonderful. One. WAKE UP.

* What comments or insights do you have from this
experience?

THE ANTHROPOMORPHOGENIC FIELD

Morphogenic fields (M-fields) are the habits of the universe,
caused by individual atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, persons,
societies, species, ecosystems, planets, solar systems and galaxies.
According to Rupert Sheldrake, whenever one morphic unit, such as a
person, learns a new behavior, the causative field for the species is
slightly changed. If the new behavior is repeated long enough, by
enough people, it reaches a critical mass, which changes the behavior
and outlook of the whole human species. Such changes occurred for
humans when we began computerizing information or awakening to female
rights. The startling thing is that the change in outlook and
behavior can occur without either genetic transmission or learning
through observation.

When organisms do something new, they change the behavioral
and attitudinal possibilities of all other organisms of the same
species. Monkeys off the coast of Japan who learned to use yams by
washing them, rapidly created yam-washing behavior for all monkeys of
their species, even though no observation or genetic transmission of
this behavior was possible. Likewise, human athletic skills and
performances keep improving, according to Sheldrake, because athletes
draw on the M-field and use the cumulative experience of everyone who
ever participated in the sport.

Influence Humanity's Morphogenic Field

Give yourself at least 20 undisturbed minutes for this
experiment. Center yourself. Embody deep wisdom and compassion and
fairness.

Relax and deeply concentrate on the idea that "each aspect of
the universe expresses itself vibrationally, and that all vibrational
expressions intermingle within the master holograms). Every aspect of
the universe contains knowledge about the whole(s) within which it
exists."[54] Imagine that what you think, feel and do can be known to
and felt by everyone and everything else, as the vibrations of all
interact.

Imagine yourself to embody seed crystals of all concepts
potentially available in the universe.

Pretend that you can choose one such concept (such as the
unity of humanity) and magnify it by your energy to change the
functioning of the world.

Imagine your chosen principle to be magnified into the
consciousness of all people.

Imagine, too, that you are an example of someone who lives by
that principle.

See yourself radiate the essence of that principle, as though
it is a white light. Imagine the white light spreading among people
until everyone is enlightened by your principle. Live a typical day,
week and year in such a world.

* Relate your principle and your experience in the
experiment above.

ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Extend Your Self Sense to Nature

Take at least two hours, silent and alone, at a seashore, in
a forest, on a mountain, in a desert or other natural environment,
away from machines, cars, radios, buildings, roads, human sounds, and
human-made artifacts.

See, hear and feel nature. Identify with and imagine you
become each object of your perception. Experience your existence as
the plants, birds, animals, bugs, streams, rocks, soil, sun, stars,
ocean, waves, clouds, wind, etc. Imagine you become their
interrelational network, the planet. Experience your various
species, climatological forces, geological features (and the like) as
your organelles, cells, tissues, organs and systems.

When you feel at one with the natural, scene you selected,
move with its pulse and rhythm. Become the leaf blowing in the
breeze, the crawdad scooting along the stream, etc.). Dance with
nature.

Sit again. From your perspective as Earth, notice humanity as it
interacts with your other parts. Tell the humans how you see, hear
and feel them as they interact with each other, with your other
creatures and your whole body and spirit.

Become Humanity and respond to Earth.

Then become Earth again. Tell humanity your resentments,
appreciations and demands. Establish a back-and-forth dialogue with
humanity, playing both roles.

As Earth, advise humanity. Give specific advice to the
student who is role-playing you. Record this advice.

* What is your existence as Earth and what advice do you
have for humanity and the student answering this question?

WITNESS AND ARCHETYPAL Deity

Your very broad archetypal thought forms--like the spirit of
the earth--represent condensations of your alienated, potential
consciousness. Become each archetype so you can discover additional,
paradoxically opposed archetypes, also your alienated tendencies. As
you own archetypal tendencies, you can use them, instead of letting
them use you. You meet ever-more powerful projections of your
alienated aspects.

The Transpersonal Witness

As you reflect on your life through the archetypal
and "mythological images common to mankind," your awareness
becomes "more universal. You become an archetype called the supra-
individual or transpersonal witness, impartially yet compassionately
witnessing "the stream of events both inside and outside the mind-
body in a creatively detached fashion."

Experiencing Your Inner, Impartial Compassionate Witness
Seat yourself comfortably in a peaceful sanctuary. Center
yourself. Become aware of the chatter of your subperselves. Feel
the dialectic of your mind and body. Picture, feel and hear the
sights, touching, sounds and fragrances of your intimate others. Be
aware that you are a creative gathering place for an existential
assembly of humans, a network of shared feelings of oneness reaching
out from your family and friends to all humans.

Then slowly say each of these sentences several times, until
you disidentify with each.

I have many subpersonalities and social masks which I wear
when I choose. Since I am aware of choosing my roles, I must be more
than my roles. I have subpersonalities and I am not my
subpersonalities.

I have a mind, a total personality, which I can feel and
intuit. Since I can experience my integrated personality, I must be
more than my personality. I have a personality and I am not my
personality.

I have a whole, completely unified bodymind, capable of
understanding and intuiting with simultaneously intellectual and
bodily awareness. I can witness my integrated organism and know that
1, as witnesser, must be more than my bodymind. I have a bodymind; I
am not a bodymind.

I have shared consciousness with other humans. Since I am
aware of extending my care,-concern and self-concept to others, I who
am aware must be more than my social consciousness. I have social
consciousness and I am not social:. consciousness.

I am the witness. I observe the flow of what is, the
interplay of sub- personalities, the embrace of body and personality,
the bonding (in authentic encounter) of separate bodyminds into
dyads, the networking of humanity. I see the mythic, the poetic, the
miraculous, beyond time and space. I am the witness' [Wilber, K.,
The Spectrum of Consciousness, Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing
House, 1977, page 273; pages 128-130]

As witness, truthfully and lovingly see, feel and hear the
life of the student, humanity, earth. Next, you behold the
archetypical deity.

Encounter Fantasized Deity Archetype

Keep your eyes closed and witness sights, sound, feeling and
intuitive intimations of an archetypical expression, manifest in the
channels best suited for you to receive it at this time, of God.
Allow the archetypical deity to take a form.

Identify with the "vibrantly alive ... radiance" of your
essential nature.

As God, reabsorb the witness, the world, the hero, the
socially enmeshed person, the organism, the personality parts of the
student who has sought you in this exercise.

As God what do you want and need?

What advice or wisdom do you have for the person channeling
you? Say this aloud.

UNITY CONSCIOUSNESS

Detach from the embodied, envisioned, sound of the
archetypical deity into formlessness. There is no god-archetype,
there is no student, "there is no awareness of the absence of these.
There is only radiance. All prior levels, of themselves arise moment
to moment in an iridescent play of mutual interpenetration."

* The experiences archetypal and unity consciousness above
contributed the following ways to my understanding of the existential
ideal of experiencing yourself at many levels of consciousness: ...

* This ideal enhances my existence in the following ways...
(complete)

posted in Existentialism - 1 reply

Existential Life Review (Pt 2) FIELD THEORY-INTENTIONALITY by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

2008-12-08T16:46:15Z

EXISTENTIAL LIFE REVIEW (Part 2) an online e-course for you
Sasha Lessin, Ph.D., sashalessinphd@... 808 244-4103

[Based on Koestenbaum, P., The New Image of the Person: The Theory
and Practice of Clinical Psychology, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1978.]

Now that you have familiarized yourself with the ideals in Lesson 1,
proceed to an ideal-by-ideal exploration of the existential model of
being starting with Intentionality.

FIELD THEORY-INTENTIONALITY (Ideal 1)

You are "a continuous consciousness-body-world field ....
Whatever affects other people and the world" affects you, too;
whatever happens to you "affects other people and the world around"
you. [Koestenbaum, P.: 1974, page 40] You are distinct, as a
consciousness, from your body, from other people, from your
environment and from the rest of the universe. Yet your
consciousness and its objects--body, other people and your
environment--are interdependent, reciprocally and continuous.
Existential field theory recognizes your inclusion in larger entities
with your body, others and the world. This connection between you
and the objects of your consciousness is intentionality.2

* Personalize field theory: relate how your awareness
currently affects and is affected by a ) your body, b) other people,
and c) your non-human environment.

* How would you benefit if you lived from field theory?

LEARN FROM YOUR SUBJECTIVE, OBJECTIVE,
INDIVIDUAL AND UNIVERSAL ASPECTS

Koestenbaum says you find peace when you learn your existence
is like a field with two dimensions, subjective-objective and
individual-universal. [op. cit. Pages 108- 141]

The subjective-objective dimension has two poles. The
subjective pole is your mind, consciousness or awareness. The
objective is the environment. The environment can include your body
and other people.

Existence connects you with your body, other people and the
rest of the world. You and your environment define each other.

You know your individual-universal options when you realize
you will die. You choose how you use your time, energy, life,
realizing you have a finite life span. Knowing your body, intellect
and unique personality will not survive makes you aware of your
individuality options.

Humanity and nature, of which your consciousness is part,
will survive you; knowing this makes your outlook more universal.
You are aware that universal, infinite, eternal consciousness runs
though you.

You can, at will, change your way of experiencing situations
by experiencing yourself from different positions between the
subjective-objective and individual-universal dimensions of the
field. You have subjective, objective, individual and universal
aspects and can emphasize whichever aspects best serve you.

* RELATE TO THE SAME SITUATION AS ENGINEER, NATURALIST,
ARTIST AND MYSTIC

Recall the last time you were upset and unable to cope well
as you prefer.

Study the chart on the next page, then follow the cues in
bold.

Identify with the ENGINEER (objective and individual) aspect
of yourself (subpersonality). Become this subpersonality and
imagine initiating a discussion with your other subpersonalities by
telling them what your existence is like. Finish this
sentences: "As . . . (your name)'s engineering capacity, here's what
I am like ...

"As Engineer and here's what I want and why I want it in the
situation....

Here's how I analyze the situation.

Here's what I advise...."

Now become your NATURALIST (universal and objective)
subpersonality and tell state your existence as follows:

"As Naturalist, here's what I am like ...

"As naturalist, here's how I see the situation....

"What I advise is...."

Be your MYSTIC (subjective and universal) part and say what
you are like, what you want in the situation and what you intuit must
be done for you to get what you need in this case.

Be ARTIST (your individual and subjective self). State your
qualities and relate your experience in the situation.

Enact a discussion among Artist, Mystic, Naturalist and
Engineer about how to handle the upsetting situation better. Talk as
each of them talk until you collectively create a perspective that
gives Artist, Mystic, Naturalist and Engineer what they each need.

Consider the proposition that you gain freedom and
adaptability when you change your perspective along the subjective-
objective and individual universal dimensions of the field of your
existence.

WE'D LOVE TO PUT YOUR REACTIONS AND EXPERIENCES UP ON THIS SITE, IF
YOU'D LIKE TO SHARE

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Existential poetry

2008-11-13T03:53:27Z

You wanted something to talk about, you think you need a moderator her's a war:

http://www.web-designer.oneuk.com/mageworld/exit/napoleon.html

Divorced From Freedom
-----------------------------------------
This grimy Victorian red brick heap
Stands as mute witness
To the infinite frailties of men
Transfigured into numbers
And also to their strengths
Rearranged in a hierarchal
Array of crimes
We scuttle like termites in a mound
Counting our pounds and days spent
In this panoptic layer cake
I crumble like a pauper into that state
Of graceless humility owned by the guilty
Fixated by the fickle nature of fate
It's a game of doubts, swings and roundabouts
And in accordence with its paradoxical nature
We reclaim the sun of our enfeebled humanity
For a precious hour of cards and comraderie
Queens are slags, they take any card
My crime is awful, in the eyes of the lawful
And criminal alike
It's alledged I held up a brothel
Drunk, blind and armed with love,
kisses, cuddles and a cudgel
That, as an intoxicated thug,
I rode it like a stolen motorbike,
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned
I wouldn't wed thus to this place I'm fed
As each day dawns I awake
From the peaceful sleep of the pawned
And in troubled waking thought
I imagine the cost
Of vision, freedoms, chattels and battles lost.

posted in Existentialism - 1 reply

SACRED MATRIX by Deiter Duhm, founder, Poly Zegg Communities

2008-11-10T19:41:34Z

SACRED MATRIX by Deiter Duhm, founder, Poly Zegg Communities
in Germany & Portugal, followed by a confluent exercise by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

Duhm quote was forwarded by Kelly Bryson. Kelly presents
experientials based on Duhm's work in his Sacred Matrix workshops.

"The unity of the organism is achieved by the individuality and
difference of the organs. In other words, it is only WHEN THE FULL
INDIVIDUALITY OF THE MEMBERS IS DEVELOPED that a HEALTHY COMMUNITY
CAN EMERGE.

"Community and individual are not opposites; they are prerequisites
for each other. The PREREQUISITE FOR A UNIVERSAL COMMUNITY IS AN
AUTONOMOUS INDIVIDUAL, AND THE PREREQUISITE FOR AN AUTONOMOUS
INDIVIDUAL IS A COMMUNITY. That is the natural order in the building
plan of Creation.

"The structure of future survival-adaptive communities is always
connected to the self-development of the individuals involved. The
more they develop their individuality and the less they let
themselves be ruled by preconceived dogmas and false authorities, the
easier it is for them to recognize their chances of development in
the community.

"At some point a deep process of INDIVIDUATION LEADS ALL HUMAN BEINGS
TO NOT SEE THEMSELVES AS private persons, but as ORGANIC ELEMENTS OF
A HUMAN COMMUNITY. For IT IS THROUGH INDIVIDUATION THAT HUMAN BEINGS
EXPERIENCE NOT ONLY WHAT SEPARATES THEM FROM OTHERS, BUT ALSO WHAT
CONNECTS THEM AT A MUCH DEEPER LEVEL. They dare to rediscover and
accept this.

"Without individuation a healthy organism cannot develop. Instead we
get conforming collectivism in which individual differences are not
promoted but instead suppressed. Collectivistic systems do not
tolerate individual autonomy. Instead, both toward the inside and the
outside, they fight everything that does not fit into their ideology.

"THE SACRED MATRIX IS THE ORIGINAL, TRANS-HISTORICAL, NON-ALIENATED,
COSMIC, AND DIVINE MATRIX OF UNIVERSAL LIFE. According to the plan of
Creation for the human being, we are to realize it on earth. It is
not a dream, but a deep, deep memory that wells up inside of us when
we touch the Sacred, and THIS MEMORY KEEPS RE-CREATING OUR YEARNING.
For the sake of truth we cannot but find and follow the content of
this yearning in its entirety, for the yearning that is recognized
and not suppressed or sentimentalized is the signpost that leads us
to our sacred home.

"There can be no peace on earth, as long as there is war in love. The
five thousand year history of the patriarchal era is a history of a
war between the sexes, and the war has not ended yet. The five
thousand year long battle against the female world is the most cruel
chapter in human history to date. We will not be able to develop
fundamental peace concepts for the earth and human beings, until we
understand this fight and its insane results in society and within
ourselves. It is a primary task for all future projects to activate
all energy to LIBERATE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SEXES, AND ALL
LOVERS, FROM THE TABOOS, PREJUDICES AND CRUELTIES OF A MAD ERA.

"A new non-violent and loving culture is rooted substantially in a
new loving and non-violent relationship between the sexes. This is a
point we cannot neglect in the new concepts for ecology, spirituality
and healing, if we want to achieve realistic solutions. THERE CAN BE
NO HEALTHY ECOLOGY WITHOUT HEALTHY AND FULFILLED SEXUALITY. We all
came into being through a sexual connection between man and woman.
Sexuality is the biological source of our life, it is truly "issue
#1, since we all exist in the body. A disruption of sexuality is a
disruption of the entire organism. Almost all illnesses in Western
society are at least partly caused by a disruption of the sexual
energy balance, and most emotional and psychosomatic illnesses of our
times are rooted in unresolved problems in the area of love between
the sexes. Many more people die each year from unresolved love
conflicts than from car accidents, and these, too, often have the
same background. AS LONG AS THE SEXES DO NOT FIND FULFILLMENT IN
LOVE, THEY MUST COMPENSATE THIS LACK THROUGH ENTERTAINMENT,
CONSUMERISM, STATUS, POWER, ADDICTIONS, AND WAR. THESE ARE THE
FOUNDATIONS OF OUR CURRENT CAPITALIST WORLD SOCIETY.

"Some prerequisites for a future free of violence is that the war
between the sexes be put to an end, that MAN BE LIBERATED FROM HIS
SECRET SEXUAL ANXIETIES AND FEELINGS OF INADEQUACY, THAT WOMAN BE
RECONNECTED WITH HER ORIGINAL POWER SOURCES AND HER CENTRAL TASKS IN
THE HUMAN COMMUNITY, AND FINALLY THAT BOTH BE LIBERATED FROM THEIR
DELUSION THAT JEALOUSY IS PART OF LOVE.

"Man and woman are the two polar halves of the one human being. They
must now come together in such a way that they "fit", so that they
might find the permanent fulfillment that is an inherent part of the
emotional and bodily love between the sexes. Here, we can no longer
avoid confronting certain carefully thought-out concepts about free
will in love relationships. Love and sexuality are universal powers
of life; in a universal society of peace they can no longer be
forcibly bound to one single person, nor can they be surrounded by
private fences.

"IN A UNIVERSAL CULTURE OF PEACE, FREE LOVE AND COMMITTED
PARTNERSHIPS do no exclude each other. Instead THEY ARE MUTUALLY
DEPENDENT AND COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER. The old patterns of
sexual "faithfulness" and jealousy are based on distrust between the
sexes.

"The deepest freedom, which lies at THE HEART OF ALL FREEDOM, IS THE
FREEDOM OF LOVE BETWEEN THE SEXES. This is the source of a new ethic
and a new order, in which human beings no longer need to deny their
own selves and hide from others. This freedom leads to a genuine,
powerful, and nonviolent joy of life. (Whether the choice is monogamy
or not) This is of central importance in the concrete utopia that we
now must bring to life. Communities of the future and projects for a
new way of life can only function in the long term if their members
know and understand the principle of freedom, if they know that it is
not in opposition to an ethic of faithfulness and responsibility, and
if they know that one is allowed to follow it. In order for this new
force to develop, we need an encompassing environment of freedom and
community. All forms of ideology or group pressure are
counterproductive when it comes to such deep changes in our core
areas. This is true for our erotic as well as for our mental and
spiritual sources."

INNER MALE & FEMALE MEDIATED BY YOUR CENTER by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.
Based on Stone, H. & Winkelman, S., Embracing Our Selves, and
Embracing Each Other both 1989, New World Library: San Rafael).

Do this experiential with a partner

INSTRUCTIONS FOR GUIDING PARTNER. Read your partner the
cues in bold print aloud. Exception: read words in square brackets
[like this] silently. Give your partner a few breaths' time to
respond aloud where you see asterisks (***). If your partner doesn't
respond to a cue-sentence, pause several breaths and read the cue
again.

Address your partner's inner voices respectfully,
appreciatively; do not push his or her limits. Use these cues as
suggestions; feel free to improvise. Start now, reading aloud:

Sit on this cushion; it'll be the position for your Center
(Aware Ego), the place from which you hear all your inner voices.

Tell me about the way you present your masculine or feminine
voice–whichever is primary to you, to the world. What's this voice
like and what does it do for you. ***

Shift your cushion to a new position, a position for that
Primary, that main voice. [Wait till your partner actually moves;
use the name (eg: Mr. Yang, Ms Aphrodite, etc.) your partner uses for
the Primary, where you see the word "Primary" below].

Hi. Embody that Primary voice and tell me who you are and
what your job is. ***

When did your life start? How long have you been around?
What's your history as [partner name]'s Primary? ***

Tell me, Primary, what vulnerable voices you protect? ***

What contributions have you, as [partner name]'s
Primary, made to [partner name]? What would you like to be
acknowledged and appreciated for? ***

Thank you, I liked talking with you. Would you let
[partner name] return to the Aware Ego position? ***

[Wait till your partner moves] Hi, Aware Ego. Tell your
observations on the voice you just embodied. ***

Tell me about the other voice in the inner male
(animus)/inner female(anima) within you. ***

Move your cushion to a position for that voice. [Wait till
your partner moves] Become this second voice, Voice 2. As Voice 2,
say how you are, what you do for [partner's name] and what
you'd like to be appreciated for. ***

Thank you, I liked talking with you. Would you let
[partner name] return to the Aware Ego position? ***

[When your partner has spoken as each of the voices (or
described vulnerable voices from the Aware Ego position) for which
you have time, say] Stand behind me, facing the spaces you occupied
for your voices as I summarize the things you said as each. Feel
each voice's energy from the perspective of neutral observer.
[Summarize what your partner said in each space.]

Return to the Aware Ego place and tell me what you learned.
***

How can you–in both your inner life and relations with other
people-- better recognize, accept, coordinate and synthesize your
inner male and inner female? ***

Please share on this website your reactions to Duhm's article andwhat
you experienced in the Dr. Lessin's confluent experiential of inner
man/inner woman.

www.worldpolyamoryassociation.com

posted in Existentialism - 1 reply

Do we choose to fail?

2008-10-25T17:46:53Z

I've got this wacky theory that our failures are a direct result of our decision to do so to the extent that true failure does not exist only the decision to do so. We miss on purpose, anyone can ski, etc.

posted in Existentialism - 53 replies

FATHOM FINITUDE by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

2008-10-18T14:57:23Z

FATHOM FINITUDE by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

Balance contemplation of your infinite, limitless connection with the
Universal when you also embrace limits, including, at this stage of
humanity's development, the likelihood your body will die, though
you'll probably shall again incarnate in another human body. Though
the Sumerian literature makes it clear that physical immortality is
possible for humans, for now, you need to deal with death–yours and
the deaths of those you hold dear.

Contemplate death to incentive you to live with full vitality,
individuality and commitment. Hypothesize that you and others will
die; this impels you to make more authentic, intimate, feelingful,
expressive contact with other people. When you assume you'll die,
you give yourself timetables for the tasks you've chosen to give
meaning to your life. Accept the likelihood you'll die, and you
therby accept responsibility for your individual, unique life in the
limited amount of time you have in your current embodyment. Explore
the concept of death to become aware of your unfinished tasks and
communications.

Here's a few guided contemplations that assist you in the existential
appreciation of finitude, limitation and death to balance your
appreciation of your infinite, universal, immortal aspects.

IF YOU LOST SOMEONE

If you, or someone you know, lost someone yesterday, this
emotional release meditation may help. Let your feelings out, let your body move, make sounds to express how you feel. You emotions may come in waves.

Sit comfortably, look at a picture of the person you lost. Then
close your eyes. Breathe deeply. Imagine your lost one is here
with you now. Make the sounds of how you feel. Allow tears, wails, shouts, sounds, words, whatever wants to release.

Let the spirit of you friend who transitioned yesterday has
something to communicate to you. Receive the message. Hear what
your loved one's spirit has to say.

Respond to what your loved one tells you. Establish a dialogue
with your beloved's spirit.

Say what you need to share with her or him. Reminisce on what
you shared. Talk about what feels unfinished to you.

Speak and release any resentments you have toward her or him and
take responsibility for your part.

Voice your appreciations.

Say what you learned from each other, what life developments your
made together. Let your departed one's sprit tell you its
appreciations for you

Tell her or him what you forgive her or him for, or that you're
open to forgiveness when it's right. Hear his or her spirit forgive you too.

Let her or him tell you if they have any unfinished business on
this plane that you can help with, that they need done so they can move to the next plane. Ask if there's anything you can do for your
beloved's relatives, friends, pets.

IMAGINE LOSING SOMEONE ALIVE NOW

Visualize your dearest living person. Imagine she or he has
only a few hours of life left, hours to spend with you. Talk to this
beloved, or, if she or he is not present, speak to her or him in
your mind or aloud now, as though it's the last time you'll converse in this life. Commit to talking and behaving with this person with the knowledge she or he may die any time.

YOUR LAST WEEK

Imagine you have one week left to live. Fantasize a final get-
together with the people and animals who mean the most to you. Tell

all, some, or one of them any unfinished, incompletely expressed
feelings you have. Let them know any angry, regretful or negative
feelings, any withholds, secrets, desires you held back. Tell them
what you appreciate and forgive them for. Tell them what you'd like
to do with them in this, your last week of life.

CONTEMPLATE YOUR OWN DEATH.

Imagine dying. Say your last words and thoughts. Imagine your
heart stops beating. Forgive yourself for your faults and
shortcomings. Separate from your body's suffering and identify with
your soul. See from above, the people nearby. Try, but fail, to talk
to and touch people nearby. Realize you're dead. Imagine dying.

Say your last words and thoughts. Imagine your heart stops.
Feel any pain you inflicted on others.

Forgive yourself and anyone you resented.

Separate from your body and suffering. Feel relief and peace.

See, from above, the people nearby. Try, but fail to talk to and
touch them. Realize you died.

Imagine you're at your own funeral. Notice the music, flowers,
those present. Let each person you care about come before your
remains, and as they do, know what they think and feel and what, were you not dead, you'd say and how you'd move toward each. Let out your
feelings.

Deliver your Eulogy. Say the meaning of your life, the love you
shared and knowledge you gained.

Imagine you're coffin or urn put in its resting place. Read the
memorial inscription.

Whoosh down a tunnel. Arrive at the bardo, the interlife.

Bring before you the spirits of those who you harmed or who harmed
you. Discuss your interactions while you were alive from the
perspective of the interlife

Let a Being of Light, the karmic guide or the Life-Review
Committee, show you the main events of your life and their consequences for others. Witness the love you gave. Notice what you learned from your life, what you contributed to humanity, to the consciousness of the cosmos.

See what you need to complete--your missions and purposes--before
you die "for real." Return to this world. Wiggle your toes. Open
and close your hands. Stretch. Swallow twice. Open your eyes; look at three things you enjoy seeing. Listen for three sounds you enjoy.

CONJURE A COMING INCARNATION

Imagine you spiral forward through time in a time machine. You
pop out in a very special future life, your ideal future.

In the future life you enter, you've assimilated all the lessons
of your prior incarnations, including the one you just left.

Notice the details of this ideal future.

IF YOU TRY THESE CONTEMPLATIONS, SHARE WHAT YOU LEARN ON THIS SITE

References:
Huxley, L., 1963, You Are Not The Target, pages 135-138
Koestenbaum, P., 1978, The New Image of the Person, pages 339-340, 512

(c) Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Franks, Sartre, Nietzsche...

2008-09-29T12:42:36Z

What's the difference?

posted in Existentialism - 5 replies

the way to Christ is simple

2008-05-21T04:25:35Z

God's Blessings often benefit all people. But many of His promises are only for His own children. If you're not sure that you're a part of God's family, He offers you this invitation. The way to Christ is simple:

1. Admit that you have a need.

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
Romans 3:23

2. Believe that Jesus is God, the Son, who paid the wages of your sin.

For the wages of sin is death [eternal separation from God]; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Romans 6:23

3. Call upon God.

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

Romans 10:9

King James Version

The Holy Bible

ISBN 978-1-58660-198-0

Barbour Publishing

www.barbourbooks.com

posted in Existentialism - 9 replies

existential solution to existential anxiety

2008-04-30T01:12:31Z

In wikipedia I found a suggestion to a so-called existential anxiety:
"The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom and our awareness of death."

I could not find what existentialism offered as a solution to this anxiety. Does existentialism offer one? if so, would the solution be in defining one's own meaning in life, by any means necessary irrespective of reason, belief or faith?

thanks in advance for your thoughts..

posted in Existentialism - 14 replies

New Hunter S. Thompson Documentary

2008-01-24T07:28:21Z

Dear Friends,
This is a VERY funny and poignant film director Blue Kraning made about Hunter S. Thompson. You can follow this link to where the trailer is posted up on Tribe:

http://people.tribe.net/ef16dbc2-...e40916ff6d

or you can follow the other links to his website www.gonzopatriots.com to see the trailer and buy the film.

I went ahead and copied the text from the tribe page below so you get a better idea of the work.

Please support the spirit of independence in which this film was made AND BUY THIS FILM !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Much Love To All,
Lisa Ferguson (aka Petunia Maple Cake)

New Hunter S. Thompson Documentary
This is the trailer for the fun-loving but poignant film that is a tribute to Gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, and a document of how his legacy continues to live on in the hearts and minds of his fans. Blasted!!! follows the many "Gonzo Patriots" across America that volunteered their personally owned artillery to fulfill the good doctor's last wish to have his ashes fired from a cannon. Before Johnny Depp became involved with the ceremony, and paid over 2 million dollars for a professional fireworks company to blast his friend's ashes from a 200 foot tall 'Gonzo fist,' an essay contest was held by the Aspen Daily News (at the request of Hunter's family) to see who would be available to provide the service of firing his ashes. Over 50 private cannon owners applied and though these letters were published in Harper's magazine, these brave men and women, who had come forward to fulfill the dying wish of their hero...were eventually forgotten.

DVD's for this film can be purchased at www.gonzopatriots.com

Blue Kraning, Los Angeles based documentary director and Emmy Award winning writer, has just released the DVD of his film, Blasted, The Gonzo Patriots of Hunter S. Thompson, which recently premiered at the Starz Denver International Film Festival and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Three years in the making, this film is a tribute to a great journalist and renowned physician. Kraning says the film, “is intended for any fan of Hunter S. Thompson or just anyone who likes to see large stuffed animals blown to bits by a homemade Bowling Ball Cannon fired by a man in a purple polyester suit, or see transgender Civil War re-enactors blast their aptly named mountain howitzer...’Lucrecia,’ while reciting Hunter’s wisdom. I made this film entirely as a one-man-band, in the tradition of Gonzo individuality and artistic freedom, so I will be distributing the film entirely by myself by selling the film off my website at www.gonzopatriots.com”

"Hunter S. Thompson embodied the American ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Blue Kraning's Blasted!!! is a twisted, anarchic, fun, and funny tribute to Hunter, those ideals, and Americans who don't merely mouth the Declaration of Independence, but live it." - Michael Simmons, The Huffington Post

“These are not the famous actors, politicians or even journalists. These are Hunter's readers who are “his people” in the purest sense, an army of thoughtful citizens who are inspired by Hunter's work and who do a fine job of carrying on his legacy.” –Anita Thompson, wife of the late author, Hunter S. Thompson

posted in Existentialism - 1 reply

What is happiness?

2008-01-13T04:00:02Z

That's it.

posted in Existentialism - 4 replies

One question.

2007-10-02T01:24:07Z

Do you think that people have a core to them, like a core personality? Or perhaps I could describe it more as something they feel confident in and can hang on to, something that is always there? Or do you think that people are merely whatever they feel/think and do from moment to moment?

posted in Existentialism - 45 replies

Existentialism and Negativity

2007-08-28T17:18:10Z

I find it interesting that when I start talking to people and sometimes the fact that I am an existentialist comes up, they take two steps back, waiting for me to grow two heads and eat their babies.
Existentialism, certainly in the US seems to have a very negative connotation, and is not viewed positively at all.
In Europe and Australia, it is more accepted, whereas in the US it is viewed as some gloomy and alienating disease that people will catch if they come too close.

posted in Existentialism - 11 replies

Kierkegaardian Moment without a divine Christ?

2007-06-13T03:55:32Z

An essential element of my understanding of existentialism is Kierkegaard's understanding of the Moment, of the eternal diving intersecting temporal humanity in the person of Christ. Lately, I've been struggling with Trinitarian theology. So, I'm wondering if it's possible to maintain the idea of the Kierkegaardian Moment outside a Trinitarian framework.

Thanks
Clint

posted in Existentialism - 1 reply

A psychological test

2007-03-23T06:55:03Z

http://extremehonesty.tribe.net/thread/b46a3fde-6299-47ab-b19c-3f3c11b52862

Post your answers in this thread not the above thread. I want to compare answers from different tribes.

posted in Existentialism - 9 replies

Existentialism per Wikipedia

2006-11-22T15:41:00Z

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

I havent studied that much about it but I guess I'm an existentialist. Hmm. I just came across this tribe. I was watching the History Channel. A story about a notorious drug dealer. The last thing they said about him was that he didnt feel guilt about anything. Selling drugs to people that wanted them wasnt wrong to him. They said he thought of himself as an existentialist & when asked what that mean he said you live your life and do what you want to do. Sounds good to me.

posted in Existentialism - 24 replies

CRUISE THE MED...DOCUMENTARY FILM MAKING

2006-11-17T01:16:17Z

Beginning in March next year, we are inviting 9 people to cruise from Bodrum, Turkey along the Turkish coast, Cyprus, Athens, Alexandria on a share expenses basis (very, very inexpensive). We began a documentary in Paris and Turkey last year, and now as it gets warmer in Turkey we are going to complete it. We have a US distributor, and everyone involved will share in profits. It could be quite profitable for you and a real life changer. We are in pre-production of three others...one on black jazz in Paris after WWII until now. We have a Turkish captain/crew/cook on our 70' Gulet, 6 double staterooms still available, all with their own head (toilet and shower). Qualifications? Simply to be able to get along with people. Age? Our producer is 60, our editor is 25. Age inmaterial if you are young in spirit. If you have video experience (HD MiniDV PAL and Final Cut Pro, writing) all the better, but we are doing this to perhaps expand the focus of our documentary which is based on the mystical aspects of Alexander the Great - Title: Force of Evidence. Creative people get free reign as long as they don't sink the ship or the project. We are interested to add some human interest...profound, provocative, funny...to the program, so film making experience in not a requirement. Come for a week or two months. Email me for details.

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Evangelion

2006-10-22T20:42:41Z

I just wanted to share this Sartre inspired clip with the tribe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp3fmAYbiO0&mode=related&search=

posted in Existentialism - 1 reply

INTENTIONALITY INFORMS THE EXISTENTIAL FIELD by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

2006-09-02T18:43:38Z

Intentionality Informs the Existential Field.

We're a part of an interactive field that includes everyone and
everything. All we think, say and do affects it all. Whatever happens
anywhere, anytime, any-dimension affects us.

FIELD THEORY-INTENTIONALITY

We're are "a continuous consciousness-body-world field .... Whatever
affects other people and the world" affects us, too; whatever happens
to us "affects other people and the world around" us. [Koestenbaum,
P. The New Image of The Person, 1974, page 40]

We're are distinct, as individual consciousnesses, from our bodies,
from other people, from our environment and from the rest of the
universe. Yet our consciousness and its objects--body, other people
and our environment--are interdependent, reciprocally and continuous.
Existential field theory recognizes our inclusion in larger entities
with our body, others and the world.

This connection between us and the objects of our consciousness is
intentionality.

To understand the existential field that All-Chakra Tantra provides:
* Take ourselves and others as we exist--living, acting, feeling
phenomena, at this moment--in an organic relationship with each
other.

* Appreciate the shifting constellations of meanings constituting our
own and other people's bodily experienced reality.

* Contact phenomena as we live them out and experience them.

* Focus on people in their concrete, meaningful, everyday experiences.

* Recognize the interdependence of our lived-bodies, space around us,
actions, experiences and the organization of our personal worlds.

* Find the meaning of life in our own limited and finite life on this
earth in our current embodiments.

* Take into equal and simultaneous consideration (for us and for all
humanity) what we relate to and how we and our objects relate.

* Explicate the essence, form and structure of human experience and
behavior through disciplined reflection and description as well as
tantric experiences.

* Simultaneously ask ourselves, "Who am I?" and "What kind of world
do I live in?" as inseparably bound aspects of our unified
personality, body and environment.

[* Definitions from Valle, R., & King, M.,1978, Existential-
Phenomenological Alternatives for Psychology, Oxford University Press]

LEARN FROM OUR SUBJECTIVE, OBJECTIVE, INDIVIDUAL AND UNIVERSAL
ASPECTS

Koestenbaum says we find peace when we learn our existence is like a
field with two dimensions, subjective-objective and individual-
universal.

The subjective-objective dimension has two poles.

The subjective pole is our mind, consciousness or awareness. The
objective is the environment. The environment can include our body
and other people.

Existence connects us with our body, other people and the rest of the
world. We and our environment define each other.

We know our individual-universal options when we realize we'll die to
life in our present embodyment. This life, we choose how we use ourtime, energy, life, realizing we have a finite life span. Knowing our
body, intellect and unique personality as constellated in their
present time/space context won't survive makes we aware of our
individuality options.

Humanity and nature, of which our consciousness is part, will survive
us; knowing this makes our outlook more universal. We're aware that
universal, infinite, eternal loving consciousness runs though us.

We can, at will, change our way of experiencing situations by
experiencing ourselves from different positions between the
subjective-objective and individual-universal dimensions of the
field. We have subjective, objective, individual and universal
aspects and can emphasize whichever aspects best serve us.
[Koestenbaum, P. The New Image of The Person, 1974, Pages 108- 141]

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Biographical Studies on Camus

2006-08-21T12:49:21Z

Has anyone read any of the biographies on Camus? Any interesting finds or book suggestions?

posted in Existentialism - 1 reply

Camus said it best

2006-08-20T19:55:56Z

http://bunnyhop.tribe.net

posted in Existentialism - 16 replies

Values

2006-07-02T20:04:04Z

I always end up coming back to the idea that my values are arbitrarily contrived which seems to invalidate most of the meaning. How do you create meaning or motivation/reasons for doing anything?
-b

posted in Existentialism - 19 replies

Sartre Cookbook

2006-07-01T20:32:05Z

The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook

We have recently been lucky enough to discover several previously lost diaries of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre stuck in between the cushions of our office sofa. These diaries reveal a young Sartre obsessed not with the void, but with food. Apparently Sartre, before discovering philosophy, had hoped to write "a cookbook that will put to rest all notions of flavour forever." The diaries are excerpted here for your perusal.

October 3
Spoke with Camus today about my cookbook. Though he has never actually eaten, he gave me much encouragement. I rushed home immediately to begin work. How excited I am! I have begun my formula for a Denver omelet.

October 4
Still working on the omelet. There have been stumbling blocks. I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone. I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, and instead they taste like cheese. I look at them on the plate, but they do not look back. I tried eating them with the lights off. It did not help. Malraux suggested paprika.

October 6
I have realized that the traditional omelet form (eggs and cheese) is bourgeois. Today I tried making one out of a cigarette, some coffee, and four tiny stones. I fed it to Malraux, who puked. I am encouraged, but my journey is still long.

October 7
Today I again modified my omelet recipe. While my previous attempts had expressed my own bitterness, they communicated only illness to the eater. In an attempt to reach the bourgeoisie, I taped two fried eggs over my eyes and walked the streets of Paris for an hour. I ran into Camus at the Select. He called me a pathetic dork; and told me to go home and wash my face. Angered, I poured a bowl of bouillabaisse into his lap. He became enraged, and, seizing a straw wrapped in paper, tore off one end of the wrapper and blew through the straw propelling the wrapper into my eye. "Ow! You lung sucking dog anus!" I cried. I leaped up, cursing and holding my eye, and fled.

October 10
I find myself trying ever more radical interpretations of traditional dishes, in an effort to somehow express the void I feel so acutely. Today I tried this recipe: Tuna Casserole.

Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish.
Directions: Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light.

While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish? I am becoming more and more frustrated.

October 12
My eye has become inflamed. I hate Camus.

October 25
I have been forced to abandon the project of producing an entire cookbook. Rather, I now seek a single recipe which will, by itself, embody the plight of man in a world ruled by an unfeeling God, as well as providing the eater with at least one ingredient from each of the four basic food groups. To this end, I purchased six hundred pounds of foodstuffs from the corner grocery and locked myself in the kitchen, refusing to admit anyone. After several weeks of work, I produced a recipe calling for two eggs, half a cup of flour, four tons of beef, and a leek. While this is a start, I am afraid I still have much work ahead.

November 15
I feel that I may be very close to a great breakthrough. I had been creating meal after meal, but none seemed to express the futility of existence any better than would ordering a pizza. I left the house this morning in a most depressed state, and wandered aimlessly through the streets. Suddenly, it was as if the heavens had opened. My brain was electrified with an influx of new ideas. "Juice, toast, milk" I muttered aloud. I realized with a start that I was one ingredient away from creating the nutritious breakfast. Loathsome, true, but filled with existential authenticity I rushed home to begin work anew.

November 18
Today I tried yet another variation: Juice, toast, milk and Cheetos. Again, a dismal failure. I have tried everything. Juice, toast, milk and whiskey, juice, toast, milk and chicken fat, juice, toast, milk and someone else's spit. Nothing helps. I am in agony. Juice, toast, milk, they race about my fevered brain like fire, like an unholy trinity of cruel denial. And the fourth ingredient! What could it be? It eludes me like the lost chord, the Holy Grail. I must see the completion of my task, but I have no more money to spend on food. Perhaps man is not meant to know...

November 21
Camus came into the restaurant today. He did not know I was in the kitchen and before I sent out his meal I loogied in his soup. Sic semper tyrannis.

November 23
Ran into some opposition at the restaurant. Some of the patrons complained that my breakfast special (a page out of Remembrance of Things Past and a blowtorch with which to set it on fire) did not satisfy their hunger. As if their hunger was of any consequence! But we're starving, they say. So what? They're going to die eventually anyway. They make me want to puke. I have quit the job. It is stupid for Jean- Paul Sartre to sling hash. I have enough money to continue my work for a little while.

November 24
Last night I had a dream. In it, I am standing, alone, on a beach. A great storm is raging all about me. It begins to rain. Night falls. I am struck by how small and insignificant I am, how the entire race of Man is but a speck in the eye of God, and I am but a speck of humanity. Suddenly, a red Cadillac convertible pulls up beside me. In it are these two beautiful girls named Jojo and Wendy. I get in and they take me to their mansion in Hollywood and give me a pound of cocaine and make mad, passionate love to me for the rest of my life.

November 26
Today I made a Black Forest cake out of five pounds of cherries and a live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word cake. I was very pleased. Malraux said he admired it greatly, but could not stay for dessert. Still, I feel that this may be my most profound achievement yet, and have resolved to enter it in the Betty Crocker Bake-Off.

November 30
Today was the day of the Bake-Off. Alas, things did not go as I had hoped. During the judging, the beaver became agitated and bit Betty Crocker on the wrist. The beaver's powerful jaws are capable of felling blue spruce in less than ten minutes and proved, needless to say, more than a match for the tender limbs of America's favorite homemaker. I only got third place. Moreover, I am now the subject of a rather nasty lawsuit.

December 1
I have been gaining twenty-five pounds a week for two months, and I am now experiencing light tides. It is stupid to be so fat. My pain and ultimate solitude are still as authentic as they were when I was thin, but seem to impress girls far less. From now on, I will live on cigarettes and black coffee.

posted in Existentialism - 7 replies

keanu reeve's acting

2006-06-22T18:32:28Z

always brings out the existentialist in me...

posted in Existentialism - 19 replies

just funny

2006-06-18T07:02:13Z

The Situation in Hell

The following is supposedly an actual question given
on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term.
The answer by one student was so "profound" that
the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet,
which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure
of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat)
or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using
Boyle's Law
(gas cools when it expands and heats when it is
compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is
changing in time. So
we need to know the rate at which souls are moving
into Hell and the
rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can
safely assume
that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave.
Therefore, no souls
are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look
at the different religions that exist in the world today.
Most of these religions state that if you are not a member
of their religion, you will go to Hell.

Since there is more than one of these religions and
since people do not belong to more than one religion,
we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect
the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.
Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell
because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature
and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume
of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate
at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure
in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase
of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will
drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during
my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before
I go out with you", and take into account the fact that I went
out with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus
I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over,
it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is
therefore, extinct . . . leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the
existence of a divine being which explains why, last night,
Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A."

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Semiotics and visual art

2006-05-31T04:25:25Z

Hi,

just joined this tribe not long ago, havn't had much time to post a whole lot, however.
I noticed that there was no art and semiotics tribe and started my own.
There isn't much there yet, but the more join the bettter, fell free to drop by, an dspread the word, wwe need members.

thanks

posted in Existentialism - 1 reply

Truth and understanding?

2006-05-21T12:37:51Z

Hi there. I would like to learn about truth and understanding. Excuse my clumsy language, I have little knowledge of existentialism's jargon. I tried to consult the dictionary for definitions of the words themselves but was swamped by metaphorical explanations which didn't clarify anything for me.

In trying to make sense of things, I feel like I am working against that goal with the attempt itself. Concepts and other mental products seem to be deviations from reality's true nature, useful to us because they break and pervert incomprehensible reality into information we can work with, create theories and make predictions. However, these same mental products are a part of the reality they distort in order to make it comprehensible. It seems like a paradox, another deviation. It seems the closer I get to truth, whatever it is (besides seemingly unknowable due to consciousness itself?), the more theories break down, or the less things make sense. So what is truth and what is understanding and what is the relationship between the two?
-b

posted in Existentialism - 21 replies

What is honor?

2006-05-20T08:52:50Z

What is honor?

posted in Existentialism - 12 replies

Questioning. A Thought.

2006-05-18T20:49:52Z

I spotted a bumper sticker this weekend that read: 'Someone who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.'
While on some levels this rang true, I couldn't help but think, 'Is it not absurd to invest too much of your faith in other human minds? Do people make you believe things, or do we give away our faith? Aren't we all responsible for determining where we invest our thoughts and faith? In my opinion, denying this responsibility WOULD be the absurdity.

My fellow existentialist, what are your thoughts on faith?

posted in Existentialism - 17 replies

The Myth of Sisyphus

2006-05-05T12:49:34Z

So I'm reading this book for a class and while the first 40 pages were alright the 20 after that have left me rather rattled, wondering what the hell this guy is getting at. Please tell me, does it continue to drone or does Camus start to get interesting?

And if you've read this book before, mind helping me out a bit on some of the main points?

What I'm getting so far is this notion of the "absurd man" and how suicide would be reconciling oneself to absurdity instead of revolting against it. So to live is to revolt against absurdity...hence a lifelong struggle so as not to succom.

What I am now finding especially confusing is this notion of freedom. Camus, as far as I perceive it, states that freedom is non-existent to the absurd man because to have a conception of freedom is to at once be a slave. But then he goes on to talk about the ultimate freedom for the absurd man. Is he purposefully being contradictory or am I not reading this accurately?

Lastly, are there any other points that people have picked up from this book that you think might be pertinent?

Thanks in advance!

posted in Existentialism - 1 reply

Is Existentialism a philosophy (and can I even be an "existentialist")?

2006-03-13T03:48:31Z

The discussion on Kierkegaard made me go back to Kaufmann's Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (in which he refers to K as the "first existentialist").

Is existentialism really like Platonism where I believe in specific things like the idea of Forms? I've always thought it was more eclectic or rather the placeholder for "I'm a little of this, NOT that, opposed to that over there, . . ." But I wondered what folks thought about these opening comments from Kaufmann:

"Existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy. . . . Certainly, existentialism is not a school of thought nor reducible to any set of tenets. . . . The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life -- that is the heart of existentialism."

posted in Existentialism - 23 replies

existentialism reading group

2006-02-27T20:50:37Z

Hello Everybody,
I am starting an existentialism reading group in San Francisco. I was thinking that we'd start with Kirkegaard (either fear and trembling or a sickness unto death), and then kind of work our way through Existentialism as a Humanism and finally wade into Being and Nothingness. Please let me know if any of you are interested in joining,

Nick

posted in Existentialism - 7 replies

15 EXISTENTIAL IDEALS by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

2006-02-27T12:41:50Z

15 EXISTENTIAL IDEALS by Sasha Lessin, Ph.D.

Peter Koestenbaum organizes existential-phenomenological findings into propositions or ideals. [Koestenbaum, P., 1974, pages 39--45.] When you live these ideals, he writes, your existence is authentic, compassionate, happy and meaningful. Examine your own and your clients' knowledge and existence, Koestenbaum suggests, in light of these ideals. He provides reflective devices, which I augment for you, to personalize the following ideals.

Realize the reciprocal INTERPLAY between you and what you experience; learn of field theory, intentionality.

Experience yourself at several LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Acknowledge that you are responsible; CHOOSE your attitudes and reactions.

Consciously experience your ever-developing sense of yourself as an individual and as humanity (phenomenologically SELF-DISCLOSE.)

Value PAIN and ANXIETY as opportunities to learn.

Use limits to make your life meaningful; reflect upon NEGATION, FINITUDE and DEATH.

Live and reflect using phenomenological bracketing (EPOCHE).

Be INDEPENDENT, SELF-RELIANT and SUBJECTIVE (to balance out love and commitment).

Realize your own unique, creative INDIVIDUALITY.

Experience TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECTIVITY; revere this core self of each and all consciousness.

Realize you are free to CHOOSE your own values and self-concepts.

Accept GUILT for your choices as signals to do better.

Say YES to life. COMMIT yourself. Be REALISTIC.

LOVE and encounter others. Be FLEXIBLE and adaptable.

Experience time living now, using the past, focused on your future.

GROW; expand and transcend your self-definition.

Use contradictions, polarities, paradoxes and ambiguities as opportuni-
ties to establish dialogues and DIALECTICS. leading to further growth.

Exercise for Confluent Understanding and Retention of the Existential Ideals:
Read each of the existential ideals (jbelow) aloud three times in the first person singular (“I”) using the present tense. As you read each, rephrase it (with no further study) in your own words.
I consciously experience the reciprocal interplay between myself and
what I experience as I understand and intentionally live with existential field theory.
I experience myself at several levels of consciousness.
I am responsible for choosing my attitudes and reactions.
I consciously experience my ever-developing sense of myself as an
individual and an illuminatory channel for humanity and higher unity; I tell myself the truth about myself as I come to know it.
I value my pain and anxiety as my opportunities to learn.
I use my limits to make my life meaningful; I use the fact of my inevit- able physical death to vitalize my life.
I both live and reflect on my life.
I am independent, self-reliant and subjective as a balance to my love and commitment.
I am a unique, creative individual.
I revere the consciousness that flows through me and others.
I freely choose my values and accept healthy guilt so I can choose
better.
I cherish and affirm my existence; I say "Yes" to life.,"
I commit myself to people, principles, goals and a lifestyle.
I am realistic. I authentically encounter and love others. I am flexible and adaptable.
I experience my life at this very moment; I am one in this moment with
what I have learned in the past as well as my hopes for the future.
I am continually growing and expanding what I consider myself to be.
I welcome contradictions, opposites, paradoxes and ambiguities as oppor-
tunities to establish MY broader understandings and growth.

posted in Existentialism - 2 replies

The Mystification of Experience in The Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing

2006-01-24T02:17:49Z

I just extracted some concepts from this key text of Laing's. Also working on Reason & Violence, a short, dense, and faithful account of 3 of Sarte's major works. Highly recommended for you phiolsophs on a time budget.

Segments on Love and Violence--selectively spliced to highlight the author's message:

Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other's own existence of destiny.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love...

Human beings relate to each other not simply externally, like two billiard balls, but by the relations of the two worlds of experience that come into play when two people meet...

What one is supposed to want, to live for is 'gaining pleasure from the esteem and affection of others'; if not one is a psychopath. Such statements are in a sense true. They describe the frightened, cowed, abject creature that we are admonished to be, if we are meant to be normal--offering each other mutual protection from our own violence. The family as 'protection racket'.

Behind this language lurks the terror that is behind all this mutual back-scratching, this esteem-, status-, support-, protection-, security-giving and getting. Through it's bland urbanity the cracks still show...

The family's function is to repress Eros: to induce a false consciousness of security: to deny death by avoiding life: to cut off transcendence: to believe in God, not to experience the Void: to create, in short, one-dimensional man: to promote respect, conformity, obedience: to con children out of play: to induce a fear of failure: to promote a respect for work: to promote a respect for respectability...

The double action of destroying ourselves with one hand, and calling this love with the other, is a sleight of hand one can marvel at. Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth. By such mystification, we achieve and sustain our adjustment, adaptation, socialization. But the result of such adjustment to our society is that having been tricked and having tricked ourselves out of our minds, that is to say, out of our personal worlds of experience, out of that unique meaning with which potentially we may endow the external world, simultaneously we have been conned into the illusion that we are separate 'skin-encapsulated egos.' Having at one and the same time lost our selves, and developed the illusion that we are autonomous egos, we are expected to comply by inner consent with external constraints, to an almost unspeakable extent.

Human beings have become so self-brutalized, banalized stultified, that they are unaware of their own debasement...

We have all been processed on Procrustean beds. At least some of us have managed to hate what they have made of us. Inevitably we see the other as the reflection of the occasion of our own self-division.

The others have become installed in our hearts and we call them ourselves. Each person, not being himself either to himself or the other, just as the other is not himself to himself or to us, in being another for another neither recognizes himself in the other, nor the other in himself. Hence being at least a double absence, haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self, no wonder modern man is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely.

Once more there is a further turn of the spiral, another twist of the tourniquet. For now love becomes a further alienation, a further act of violence. My need is a need to be needed, my longing a longing to be longed for. I act now to install what I take to be myself in what I take to be the other person's heart...

The violence we perpetuate and have done to us, the recriminations, reconciliations, the ecstasies and the agonies of a love affair, are based on the socially conditioned illusion that two actual persons are in relationship. Under the circumstances, this is a dangerous state of hallucination and delusion, a mishmash of phantasy, exploding and imploding, of broken hearts, reparation and revenge.

Yet within all this, I do not preclude the occasions when most lost, lovers may discover each other, moments when recognition does occur, when hell can turn to heaven and come down to earth, when this crazy distraction can become joy and celebration.

And, at the very least, it befits Babes in the Wood to be kinder to eachother, to show some sympathy and compassion, if there is any pathos and passion left to spend.

But when violence masquerades as love, once the fissure into self and ego, inner and outer, good and bad occurs, all else is an infernal dance of false dualities. It has always been recognized that if you split Being down the middle, if you insist on grabbing this without that, if you cling to the good without the bad, denying the one for the other, what happens is that the dissoviated evil impulse, now evil in a double sense, returns to permeate and possess the good and turn it into itself.

When the great Tao is lost, spring forth benevolence and righteousness.
When wisdom and sagacity arise, there are great hypocrites.
When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.
When a nation is in confusion and disorder, patriots are recognized...

Perhaps men and women were born to love one another, simply and genuinely, rather than to this travesty that we can call love. If we can stop destroying ourselves, we may stop destroying others. We have to begin by admitting and even accepting our violence, rather than blindly destroying ourselves with it, and therewith we have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

Jean-Paul Sartre said

2005-12-21T02:45:14Z

"Smoking is the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world."

However, governments are going to extremes to take this act out of our lungs and out history.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/11/lame_history_revisio.html

posted in Existentialism - 10 replies

A bit of Comfort

2005-11-29T23:00:57Z

The following is a paper I wrote for my high school world lit. class. The assignment was to be for or agaisnt a philosophy, and so I chose Existentialism. Please feel free to critize, agree, pick apart!

A Bit of Comfort.
Existentialism is a valuable spiritual tool to one who wishes to achieve a greater understanding about themselves and existence. From careful research such as personally exercising the philosophy, and largely because the objectives of the philosophy were easy for me to comprehend, I found practicing Existentialism can lead to a greater satisfaction of ones spiritual well being in regards to the turbulent and awkward emotions one can harbor concerning their existence.
"Existence Precedes Essence"-Satuire. One must realize they exist before they began to define their existence. This can be a hard concept to grasp, or to become fully consciously aware of. Obviously, one is was aware of their physical existence, however one usually does not know how to comprehend, much less even begin to fathom a solution to the dreams they dreamt or their conscious which most chose to view as a constant mockery ringing through their mind. Some, including myself, once numbed these foreign and rather intruding feelings by altering the chemistry of the body, but eventually reality slaps one in the face as it did to me, thus now I feel as if reality is trying to hold my hand, as if I was its antidote. The interim between reality's slap and our alienation was rather lonely, however fortunately during this lonely stretch of time, I made the choice of paying attention to Paul Forester's lecture on Existentialism.
Choices and consequences define existence, and to make these choices, one must truly listen to what lies within. I am not quite sure if that bizarre feeling one usually calls a conscious, comes from chemical imbalances, environmental conditions, or the mysterious effects of global warming; however, nevertheless I have found if one listens to their conscious, there are less harsh consequences.
After researching Existentialism, I feel very fortunate to be female, because many wise people have told I me that females are much more in tuned with the forces of nature than males, and I feel that a have been able to achieve greater levels of intuition through Existentialism. Basically, Existentialism fabricated a new realm of understanding in my mind, in which I was finally able to comprehend my existence with a greater level of satisfaction and comfort. I believe Existentialism a valid philosophy.

posted in Existentialism - 27 replies

Sartre in the kitchen

2005-04-07T18:51:54Z

I don't know if this has come up before, but if you are hungry and also feeling anguish or despair at the absurd nature of your hunger or kitchen this may offer you an exit:

http://www-berkeley.ansys.com/wayne/sartre-cookbook.html

posted in Existentialism - 4 replies

Is being nothingness?

2005-03-09T19:33:54Z

If so, is there never a post or any ongoing thread on "Existentialism"?

Is "Existentialism" subsumed under:

http://pittsburgh.tribe.net/tribe/d8f35de3-a2cf-4226-a3da-e95e46a83f29?_click_path=Application%5Btribe%5D.Tribe%5Bd8f35de3-a2cf-4226-a3da-e95e46a83f29%5D&r=10653

posted in Existentialism - 9 replies

16 principles of human existence : Source ?

2005-03-06T07:33:36Z

Can anyone tell me the origin, author, and source of this work ?

"The Sixteen Principles of Authentic Human Existence"

1) Pain : I choose to value my pains.

2) Death : I choose to value my limitations.

3) Reflection : I am able to both live my life and reflect upon my life.

4) Self-Reliance : I am an adult consciousness who exists alone. I choose to be independent and self reliant.

5) Individuality : It is right and normal for me to seem different from other human beings.

6) Eternity : There exists a consciousness within me which I am, and which is eternal.

6A) Reverence : Each individual human inward subjectivity is the divine consciousness in mankind.

7) Freedom : I always choose because I am always free.

8) Life : My first and last choice is to say yes to life.

9) Commitment : I am free to make commitments.

9B) Reality : I clearly distinguish reality from fantasies, dreams rationalizations, and wishful thinking.

10) Love : As an adult I can choose to meet, confront, witness, understand and be mirrored by another.

11) Adaptability and Flexibility : I can choose myself as one who is realistically flexible.

12) Time & Futures : I experience time as living in a present which utilizes the past and connects directly and primarily into my future.

13) Growth & Self-Transcedence : My life is an endless process of growing, emerging, and reaching out.

14) Contradiction : The inescapable amibiguities, contradictions, and paradoxes of life are my powerful allies.

~ Please post a response if you know the author & origin of this work which I have just summarized here. ~ Marcus

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

authenticity

2005-03-04T19:51:37Z

On the German Philosophy tribe I've been considering the Frankfurt school critique Heidegger, and the Existentialists in general, for their project of authenticity.

This has gotten me thinking, because in my view authenticity is extremely important. When I consider that idea critically, I see that to some degree my focus on authenticity is pre-reflective. I have a visceral response to discourse of authenticity and an innate impulse to move in that direction.

I think it's high time I put it on the table, and this seems like a good forum to start.

My basic position is that authenticity is of fundamental importance to treating human problems, both on an individual and societal level. It is my belief that often when people behave in destructive ways, they are often not being honest with themselves about what they are doing. To put it another way, when people understand the truth of what they want in the world, they are less likely to cause suffering for themselves or others.

I realize there is a core optimism at the heart of this belief, which is a little funny because I am something of a cynic and a misanthrope. However, one can draw systematic empricial support for this view. The foundation of psychoanalysis, for example, is that when people understand the truth of what is going on in their lives it has an immensely therapeutic effect.

I would also add that when people act in coarsely destructive ways, such as certain American politicians I could name, it is often accompanied by coarse and obvious instances of dishonesty. On the contrary, the rare politicians I have seen who seem highly ethical, like Senator Russ Feingold from Wisconsin, exhibit a deep commitment to truthfulness.

Of course, it is not necessarily the case that more ethical behavior will lead to less suffering, but I believe that by definition ethical behavior at least works TOWARDS less suffering.

So there it is - the short version of my conviction that authenticity is the ground of ethical and therapeutic human action. I'd love to debate it on an ideas level.

PS I have cross-posted this idea to a couple different tribes, but I don't think that is inappropriate because I'm willing to carry on the discussion independently in each Tribe.

posted in Existentialism - 2 replies

REAL WORLD ISSUES!

2005-02-28T15:11:41Z

oh boy oh boy...
I was watching the news this afternoon... and yeah..........
Channel 10 outta Syracuse. they cover the Ny news it's pretty neat .. i enjoy it.
But anyway, A middle aged man was found in Nyc with a NEW STRAIN of HIV.. this is a more severe strain and is very dangerous,
Unlike the one we are all most commonly familiar with which takes a few Years to develope, this new strain developes in only 2 to 3 months!

All i ask is that you be safe , choose your partners wisely and get tested.

(sry i'm done feeling all responsible now)
Thanks for your time
Caylin

posted in Existentialism - 22 replies

Soren Kierkegaard

2005-01-20T08:32:22Z

So...is he or is he not an existentialist? Like Nietzche, he technically predates the actual coining of the term. But, like Nietzche, I have heard some folk classify his writings as some of the earliest existentialist works.

posted in Existentialism - 22 replies

Fascination~

2004-12-23T01:23:53Z

Hey guys, my name is Nate. I'm a 19 year old male. (Not that it matters, but some of you might like to know.)

Recently- I had seen the movie I heart huckabees. (which was hilarious by the way) After i saw it, i just kind of dismissed it in my mind. But yesterday as i was sitting down, contemplating my beleifs (I'm ALWAYS thinking) the word 'Existential' popped back into my conscious consciousness.

I started looking it up online, and was reading until my eyes hurt. I couldn't beleive how passionate and alive i felt suddenly reading this philosophy. It made SO much sense to me i couldn't beleive it. I've studied alot, especially spirituality and religion, and although i have been very interested in philosophy- I've never really dug too deep.

But now it's like i am obsessed.

Can someone please help me with some information? Suggested books, etc, or even some good webpages? I have a feeling this is the beginning of a new and long journey for me with this.

Nate

posted in Existentialism - 3 replies

how does an existentialist deal?

2004-12-07T20:04:47Z

i TRY to live my life as much existentialistic as i am able.

sometimes, it's damn hard.

how do you deal? the angst, the being surrounded by the innane and the unenlightened?

posted in Existentialism - 23 replies

Existence... I am very glad to be here.

2004-11-29T02:49:21Z

I haven't been around Tribe.net for around a month now since I got into a nearly fatal car accident. I just wanted to say... I am doing okay,. Oh yeah... EVERYTHING faded to absolute white.

posted in Existentialism - 6 replies

Life Weary.

2004-09-12T00:40:21Z

In the paradigm of Existentialism, what really prevents one from just choosing to end the suffering of a pointless existance?

Angst and ennui are too much. The arrogance and immorallity of this culture (WhiteDominated/Capitalistic/Patriarchal) is intolerable. TV and clubs suck. Drugs and Alchohol are no thrill.

Now what?

posted in Existentialism - 17 replies

The real thing

2004-09-11T11:59:09Z

Situation: You have a headache that goes beyond the average headache. You are diagnosed with a brain tumor that is in a difficult spot to remove and your faculties may be hindered greatly or you may die....what book would you refer to to find insight on your decision for or against surgery.
I'll go first.
Answer: None...existentialist thought is about as effective as cold baking.

posted in Existentialism - 6 replies

Bored existentialists?

2004-09-08T21:22:51Z

I know I am!

posted in Existentialism - 12 replies

being is doing

2004-08-18T23:47:19Z

I was feeling very fragmented into various projects(?)and identities, roles, and was looking for something grounding I suppose or true, and then in my searching remembered this idea that "being is doing" which i had lost or forgot or questioned or just assumed without really applying it to my life. It has been very helpful, not to see myself as an aggregate of identities, selves, fragmented self, but as a unified being of action. And reading de Man, lately, re language in somewhat existentialist terms, but advanced, has been helpful.

posted in Existentialism - 0 replies

The cover for the group

2004-08-10T01:57:24Z

"I am separated from myself by my essence, and from my essence by the nothing that I am." -Sartre in Being and Nothingness...cant remember the page its like 478. Does this internet help us move into that essence and end the nothingness or does it just play into that nothingness, making us think we are expressing that essence to something real.

posted in Existentialism - 4 replies

Quote by Camus...

2004-08-08T22:26:37Z

...re-reading "The Plague"...In discussing the plague and the subsequent quarantine...

..." Oh, I know it's and absurd situation, but we're all involved in it, and we've got to accept it as it is..."

posted in Existentialism - 1 reply

existentialism and hedonism

2004-07-07T02:31:41Z

compatible?

posted in Existentialism - 4 replies

What's the point?

2004-04-30T21:13:31Z

Well?

posted in Existentialism - 4 replies

i dunno if people check this but

2004-04-13T03:46:25Z

i havent read too much philosophy, but i picked up some nietzsche and everything he says is what i've thought since the 7th grade :) i love that guy

posted in Existentialism - 7 replies