Wholeness

…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

Phenomenology where the mind reflects on and examines its own experience is sometimes the only refuge one has from the cruelty of being in the world.

I have taken shits bigger than pheneogoly…googyyyy.

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.

Definitely.

So what’s your problem with phenomenology?

I dont know…whats the problem with being off ones rocker??? :sunglasses: :sunglasses: :sunglasses:

Metaphorical idiomatic non sequitur ad hominem plus emojis.

I like you felix, no clue why but I do. :sunglasses: :sunglasses: :sunglasses:

:confusion-confused:

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.

Wikipedia notes that "phrases such as “contemplating one’s navel” or “navel-gazing” are frequently used, usually in jocular fashion, to refer to self-absorbed pursuits.”

Philosophy itself apart from dialog has been derogatorily characterized as belly button gazing. Phenomenology is a way of doing original philosophy centered in one’s own consciousness.

Exactly. And those are phenomenological questions. Per Kant we can never know “the ding an sich”. And the special sciences put the true nature of objects out of the reach of our everyday consciousness.

With the technological expansion of images and words, everything seems to fall apart into mere appearances. it seems that we now are flooded by fragments without any wholes. But, through phenomenological reflection we discover that parts are only understood against the background of appropriate wholes. Identity and intelligibility are available in things. We ourselves are the ones to whom such identities and intelligibilities are given.

I hear what you’re saying. Church Orthodoxy destroyed much of the diversity of early Christianity. But the historic church was also the means by which not only the teachings of Christ but, along with Islam, classical civilization itself was preserved and conveyed to the present. Whose account are you reading? Have you read Dominion by Tom Holland?

Holland, a professing agnostic, makes the case that the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination. Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves.

How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this conviction as they influenced history.

Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. Holland demonstrates, our morals and ethics are not universal but are instead the fruits of a Western civilization that was Christianized and remains so today if often subliminally.

Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the modern world.

There are a bunch of videos where Holland discusses the book on YouTube if your interested.