Causality (detail)

Updated July 16, 2015

Behavior Patterns

Each individual has a particular space-time image of reality. Patterns of day-to-day behavior reinforce a unified way of seeing and living. The word, “lifestyle” was coined by Alfred Adler to refer to a person’s habitual way of interacting with the world. Contemporary of Freud and Jung he broke from the group in favor of a more individualized approach to psychoanalysis and was the ancester of what has become cognitive psychology. He saw how each person’s early adaptations to life created patterns that could interfere with them later on. These life patterns could be changed once recognized, reorganized into a style of living that would one’s capacities to grow. His psychiatry was practical. The “inferiority complex” starts with the universal experience of being dependent on others. After all, as a baby we can’t do anything but observe the caregiver and their attitude toward both us and our many requirements. The sense of inferiority is strengthened if much is made of our inadequacy, which pushes us to overcome it. It could be the motivation to great accomplishment since getting beyond an obstruction involves building skills, which become their own reward. His psychoanalysis involved how an individual participates in their world. Thinking about the whole context and treating everyone equally, his was a common sense , big picture perspective.

Early understanding of concepts begins with the feeling of our body in response to what the pattern leads us to expect. This is the visual analysis going on beneath conscious awareness and guiding decisions most of the time, and like any other unconscious process if we don’t know it’s there we can’t change it. Becoming aware of shifting feelings is the door into more choice of response. Sensitizing perception to the overview, to unifying patterns within the whole, leads to sensible action.

The difficulty is around the issue of trust. The promptings of perceptual thinking are often dismissed. One of the ideas that started with Freud and was then taken up with a vengence was that people are basically terrible and have to be controlled, that the unconscious forces below the surface were full of negative drives and appetites. How this allowed those in power  and doing the controlling to believe that they were different is a question for history to expose.

The great American philosophers John Dewey, Samuel Pierce with Jane Addams saw the value of ideas as in their use and brought common sense back into philosophy, saw context over law.

It’s been a pleasure seeing Abraham Maslow coming up more often as the more-or-less father of the current trend in happiness research. Real pleasure isn’t something pursued for its own sake, it’s the by-product of using capabilities to the fullest, whatever they happen to be, to unfold the full extent of what we can do with our particular potentialities and interests and grow in participation with whatever we have to offer. The entertainment culture sidelines a wealth of personal gifts by fanning fears that inhibit action. It’s only through action that we reveal ourselves in the various roles as we function in relation to our world. Spinoza wrote that anxieties are caused by inadequate ideas which he defines as those we don’t act on. Empty imagining without effort just makes us dissatisfied and dissatisfaction should be the beginning of motivation. They are closely related in the brain.

For Adler the will to power is the driving force in being human. Not power over others but in most effective use of individual power, meant to overcome weakness by building knowledge and skill. Self-improvement demonstrates the meaning of life, developing personal capacities to show yourself who you are, creating behavior patterns that exhilarate rather than pacify.

Objectivity (Complete)

Examples

“Be the change you want to see in the world. “ Gandhi

Chanting this often in my mind, among the examples that continue to inspire me are two powerful women, Susanne Langer and Jane Addams. Not well known to history their names are resurfacing as modern brain science stimulates a new generation of philosophers who point to the value of the arts in developing what is most meaningful in human beings. Art refines decision making with awareness of beauty as a guide to the wisdom of the body. Moving gracefully, in harmony with surroundings, has a feeling attached in the same way as does vertigo at the top edge of a cliff. The human mode of experiencing movement is the universal we share. Susanne Langer saw the body in motion and its analogues in the arts as the foundation of philosophy. In her brilliant summation, “Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling”, she makes clear the centrality of the range of human feeling as signifying values and directing choices. While more celebrated philosophers were talking their way into meaninglessness, she bravely marched into meaning and its subtleties; value, context, the revelation of being and how these ideas are best expressed in the arts. She ignited a trail of thought that is now reinforced by the areas of philosophy that build on brain science. An example of an academic powerhouse created by immersion in scholarship she could lay out a view of things that made sense in its honest inclusion of subjective reality. As John Dewey wrote, “When the personal is taken into account it will revolutionize philosophy.”

 Before them both Jane Addams took her ideas to the people with Hull House. Her vision was to provide art and music to the poor immigrant communities using the universality of how we feel as shown in art to connect people beneath the surface differences. Though she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her anti-war efforts later, Hull House also hosted political debate and she was instrumental in advocating laws to protect children from industry’s exploitation. Her work anticipated today’s community arts movement and the focus on positive action rather than punitive codes.

Today pre-twenty-first century attitudes still exist that take it upon themselves to correct others’ behavior while missing vast reservoirs of misbehavior in themselves. No matter what parents try to correct in their children they can’t make a dent in the powerful day-to-day example being set by how they themselves behave. Pushing other people around just causes resentment particularly when there are glaring inconsistencies in the behavior of whoever is in control. When the police officers in Baltimore get a maximum of $350,000 bail for killing someone they shouldn’t have been arresting in the first place and a teenager that broke a police car window got $500,000 bail, there’s an obvious imbalance.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/teen-faces-higher-bail-baltimore-cops-accused-murder

This example shows the serious crisis of proportions in the underlying problem. Jane Addams called it the “unpardonable sin” to value an inanimate object/symbol or idea/law over the individual human being in a particular context. Justice is about balance, the blindfolded woman holding the scales. It is when facts aren’t seen together as a picture that the disproportions go unnoticed.

 Art educates proportions and the young artists of today are connected to the world in unique ways in tune with changing modern circumstances. This year’s graduating class is sending many fine examples of dedication to what can be offered through who they are into a world that needs what they can show it, who understand that the more you give to whatever you do, the happier you are. Many participated in the protests and the cleanup and helped shine light on the unnoticed parts of the picture. And in their work they reach into the heart, cutting through the mind-numbing repetitions of popular culture to offer deeper recognition of what it’s like to be alive now.

Objectivity

                   This is a detail from my current drawing in progress.

Reflection

Visual philosophy, like any philosophy, has central ideas upon which many other ideas can be structured. One primary visual principle is mirroring, the essence of understanding. Mirroring an expression is how we know its meaning. Whether we spontaneously make the expression physically or just in the brain’s mirror neuron system we get the expression’s meaning because we feel it inside. Mirror neurons fire as though you were in the face or body position whether you watch or read or hear an action described.

This correspondence can be useful to unfurl the murky areas of our psyche. We find what we need to see in order to unlock what wants to be noticed. Every image stirs connections prompted by that structure. Reflecting on where our attention is drawn can show us themes of our inner dynamics that may be influencing our behavior without our awareness. In all the possibilities the world offers, the thing that captures attention often mirrors current inner conditions. The feeling attached to every image is a result of the adjustments and associations we make for that structure in combination with the existing mood and predispositions affecting the way we respond. Still water reflects most accurately. As the state of mind becomes more agitated so does the distortion in the reflection. One of the many benefits of meditation is simply letting the ripples of the mind settle so as to better reflect. We can’t grasp something until we see it. To see it requires attention to the subject in the here and now and not the internal weather. To develop visual intelligence, understanding the internal weather that predisposes our response to overall patterns is the first step. An unfolding event that can be taken in stride most days might cause a meltdown if the initial conditions are turbulent. This is where art can help to increase self-awareness. Art distills the essential structure of feeling so that we can reflect on it externally. Looking at what we respond to in art shows something of our own feelings at that time. As Joseph Campbell said, ”The eyes are the scouts of the heart”. Finding the art that moves us will trigger the associations we’re trying to organize.

Rupert Sheldrake sees the task of consciousness as the act of making choices in the “field of possibilities”.  Reflecting on the movement of thought reveals the choices made and the ones that are pending. Listening, looking and every act of attention make selections that open new choices. All choices participate in consciousness but deliberate mindful awareness swells the quality of the experience.

Mindfulness is a capacity that can be developed with meditation. Even starting with ten minutes of watching the wild uncontrollable movie of the mind is to learn something important about what wants attention and how little conscious control we often have regarding its movement. If you don’t follow the thoughts they’ll give up and start to subside, and then you can feel the air come in your nostrils, and your chest rise and fall, and places where you are crooked can be noticed and straightened. In the I Ching it says “With the back straight the ego disappears”. If we could get the marks of life’s difficulties out of our bodies perhaps they would fade from our minds. It might be easier to do than the other way around. With the habit of meditation it becomes possible to reflect more mindfully on right where we are.

Materialism