Category: Values
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Organisms must be free to choose
Why must organisms be free to choose? It’s because organisms must be free to act according to their own beinghood. It’s a foundational principle, because the cosmos itself is a free process of true and original creation. Compelled behavior is not creative. Organisms must be able to respond to the world. Skye Hirst emphasizes that:…
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Iain McGilchrist on value-ception
If Iain McGilchrist is right, then values are part of a conscious cosmos. Value-ception is immediate.1 Whenever we perceive something, we perceive the unanalyzed whole, and in this whole its value.2 This does not negate an axiological3 analysis of the original value-ception. We depend, however, on our right hemisphere for it to be disclosed to…
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Amy Mindell on Metaskills
Amy Mindell explores the ways therapists express their attitudes and beliefs about life in her book Metaskills: The Spiritual Art of Therapy. These attitutes permeate and shape the therapist’s techniques. The therapist’s values are expressed in the interactions with the client. Amy Mindell has seen many therapists “in action”, how their theoretical ideas and techniques…
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Iain McGilchrist on perception of value
Iain McGilchrist and Alex Gomez-Marin explores Iain’s latest book The Matter with Things in a series of dialogues. In Episode 26: Value, Alex asks the following question, which I would have liked to ask Iain myself. (The question and answer are edited for brevity and clarity. My emphasis in italics.) 27:15 >>Alex Gomex-Marin: You write…
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Iain McGilchrist on Value & Purpose
The following is from Iain McGilchrist’s lecture for The Weekend University on September 23, 2022. McGilchrist argues that value and purpose are constitutive of reality, and that reason and evidence strongly support such a conclusion. My emphasis is in italics. 2:15 >>Iain McGilchrist: I believe consciousness is first irreducible, and second, best thought of as…
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Bill Plotkin on Soul, Felt-sense, and Metaphor
The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a thorough description of the most essential things Plotkin has learned over the past 40 years about the journey to full maturity as human beings. Bill Plotkin uses common words in uncommon ways. Soul is, for example, an ecological concept. Soul Bill Plotkin writes (my emphasis…
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The legacy of bullshit ideas
I have read David Graeber and David Wengrow’s the Dawn of Everything: A New History of Everything. I was struck by the thought that the great tragedy in human history is how easily we fall victim to our own bullshit ideas. The sickness we have suffered throughout history is our callousness to the intrinsic value…
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Life brings responsiveness
Iain McGilchrist conveys in The Matter With Things the complexity, responsiveness, and purposiveness of living cells — let alone trillons of them acting together.1 Iain McGilchrist maintains that “life vastly enhances the degree of responsiveness of, to and within the world“.2 What life brings is the capacity for valuing. All living creatures are able to…
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What is good is independent of utility
There are intrinsic goods1 which are independent of utility. Intrinsic goods are, furthermore, more valuable than extrinsic and systemic ones.2 Utility substitutes the complexity of reality with cause and effect mechanisms with ultimate focus on outcomes. Utility suggests that such outcomes can be assessed by calculation (the greatest happiness of the greatest number). There are…
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My 10 Year Summary: What I Have Learned
Contents 1. Introduction2. Background3. My Journey 3.1. The initial years (2012–2015) 3.2. The middle years (2016–2018) 3.3. The final years (2019–2022)4. Conclusions5. Afterword6. Acknowledgments7. Recommended Books 1. Introduction I started blogging ten years ago today (Sept 26, 2012). At the same time, I started searching for life-giving ways of working. This is a summary of my journey and…