Oh, I don’t mind a bit of derealisation now and again… it can be quite fun and break up the monotony of existence every-so-often… a neural pause button, if you will. It takes One inward, to experience unique thoughts and feelings that One otherwise wouldn’t care to entertain. Being too grounded ain’t no fun, no fun… a balance was struck, between a private inner world and an outward facing sociality.
Sounds like detachment ^^^ ? from a reality that is difficult to cope with… especially if there are a few things that One is simultaneously having to cope with/adjust to. Makes sense… ensuring that stress, and cortisol, are minimised.
I suddenly came to a realisation just now, that I have to reacquaint myself with myself, in that my daily personal growth and me experiencing that growth in real-time had ceased, and so I now have to catch up with myself i.e. synchronisation… first, my thoughts needed de-buffering, now this.
…relative detachment from the ego to what is immediately presenting itself. In the past I have referred to it as decentering. Consciousness always has an object. The object of our attention speaks to us out of the background of the world. The Self is guiding our attention whether we’re conscious of it or not. So we’re free to focus on the small stuff that presents itself as proximal to us at the moment without worry about egoic concerns.
Wholeness (holiness), in the language of the brain, is homeostasis. Belief by analogy of mental content to physical reality is a field of study that has not yet arrived. Perhaps in the future we will be able to list and catalog beliefs and their physical underpinnings.
Homeostasis, is primarily and historically a biological concept. I read that the word was coined by Walter Bradford in 1926, but that the concept of regulation of the internal environment was already described by Claude Bernard in 1849. (Wikipedia). In 1932 Joseph Barcroft was the first to say that higher brain function required the most stable internal environment. So homeostasis is not only organized by the brain but serves the brain. As such homeostasis is an exclusively biological term referring to the constancy in the internal environment in which the cells of the body live and survive.
How homeostasis is related to experience is a question. It seems like it would be limited to experimental science where physiological states can be correlated with reports of mental ones. This might include fMRI scans of the brain while the subject reports mental states in a controlled environment. In any case it is beyond the everyday possibility of our phenomenal experience except as speculation.
In Being and Time Heidegger discusses the seeming impossibility of getting our being- a- whole into our grasp ontologically and determining its character. He asks whether the entity that we are can ever become accessible and it’s being a whole. There are important reasons which seem to speak against the possibility of having it presented in the manner required. The possibility of this being a whole is manifestly inconsistent with the ontological meaning of care and care is that which forms the totality of our structural whole. (page 315 of the Kindle edition) The primary item in care is the ahead- of- itself and this means that in every human being exists for the sake of itself.
So it would seem that our preoccupation with wholeness as an ideal is a case of our being ahead of ourselves. And it is one that can never actually be realized in this life though it is the goal and teleology of the archetypal self. How this relates to homeostasis is beyond the scope of our everyday unscientific phenomenological reflection.
In Jungian theory, the Self is drawing us to transcend ourselves. But we are always on the way, always moving in temporality. Life is never whole until it’s over.
Which is not to say that envisioning wholeness is without value. Victor Frankel talked about projecting oneself into the the future beyond this life and imagining looking back at ourselves when we’re making important decisions. Looked at from that imaginal highest vantage point, what would be the best choice?
I see homeostasis as a striving toward wholeness, not as the arrival which is our final destiny. Evolution, of which this striving is an aspect, appears to be both deterministic and creative. These experiences must have mental expression in order for us to strive toward wholeness and to be creative. The body is the temple of the indwelling God; And I find it hard to believe God would expect us to comprehend spiritual matters without giving us direct experiences as clues.
Sure. Homeostasis is another instance of the Tao–the principle of balance without which we couldn’t live. It’s built into us. It’s in us and we are in it. As the logic of being it is the logos upon which the world is modeled. We’re nested in it like a Russian doll. And so is it nested in us. It’s our inner ecology within our outer ecology. Without both inner and outer balance nothing can survive and thrive. Human language is another emergent manifestation of the logos. Humans didn’t invent it. It emerged as a phenomenon --linguisticality-- in which we exist. And as intrinsically goal directed and intentional, linguisticality points to the teleology of evolution which reductive science denies.
I think that our problem as a society is that we’ve been told that one thing followed another and this is how we arrived at where we are. Experience tells us that things are happening in stranger ways, and that the emergence of life and perception out of animal awareness is something that seems to have come from nothing. It is something we have difficulty getting our head around.
Who is to say that God is not responsible for chemicals coming together as DNA. thus starting the chain of living beings? Who is to say that God is not responsible for mind as an epiphenomenon of brains? Ecosystems suggest an ethical order for living beings as do cycles of nature (nitrogen, water, etc.) and the conservation of energy principle. What goes against the positive attributes for living is the lusts of the human mind, which will dissect and destroy to assert its supremacy. Humility is the antidote for ravages of human hubris. A humble person will not desecrate the biosphere.
The so-called hard problem of consciousness for materialistic modernity, isn’t a problem from a theocentric perspective. Bottom up emergence isn’t a mystery when it’s coupled with top down emanation. Evolution isn’t a mere random accident in a meaningless universe. It has a teleology and is moving toward the Omega point.
As long as Dasein is as an entity, it has never reached its ‘wholeness’. But if it gains such ‘wholeness’, this gain becomes the utter loss of Being-in-the-world. In such a case, it can never again be experienced as an entity.
BEING AND TIME BY MARTIN HEIDEGGER, page 315, Kindle edition
I was reading Karl Jaspers’ philosophy of existence the other day. Clearly he was doing phenomenology. His thinking parallels that of Heidegger’s in many ways.
It can also lead to continuous pondering of one’s own belly button.
But there are so many phenomena where we wonder if we have understood or recognised the phenomenon for what it is, or if I am missing something. I am at present looking into the influence of Greek thought on Christianity and have come across the fact that the Roman Emperor Theodosius went about destroying as much influence as he could. The Coptics had a field day in Egypt too. It was something like the ISIS terrorists destroying statues or defacing them. It makes me ask whether the take away from Christian teaching on wholeness would have been available (perhaps in abundance) had there been no church.
