This is a retrospective of week 2 2024 (2024-01-08–2024-01-14). Here is the retrospective of the previous week.
I’m currently reading the following books:
- Animal Tracking Basics by Jon Young and Tiffany Morgan. This book is about tracking, but it’s also about paying more attention. Attention is, by the way, a moral act.1
- Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature by Jon Young, Ellen Haas, Evan McGown. “Layers” of learning underlie all human development, often invisible, always alive. This is a large book which tries to capture universal principles in words and stories. The authors give principles and encourage innovation with them. It’s about growing into self-knowledge. A core principle is to pay attention.
- The New Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir. Developing a family is the hardest job in the world. This book is about discovering a better life together.
- Mind in Motion: How Actions Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky. This book shows how we think about space and how we use space to think. Spatial thinking, rooted in space and action in it, is the foundation for all thought. Memories and images may be vivid, but words flail and fail to capture them.
- Arbetssamhället: Hur arbetet överlevde teknologin av Roland Paulsen. Paulsen skriver att arbetet alltid har medfört en kuvning av den egna viljan. Den stora förnedringen ligger i anställningskontraktets maktassymetri. Detta påminner mig om att uthyrning av människor inte har mer legitimitet än försäljning av människor.2
I’ve started reading:
- Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali (Research in Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies) by Leanne Whitney. Whitney says that aliveness is felt in the silence, in that pure being.3 Aliveness is embodied. The life is known, instead of being represented through a thought form, or a construct. Although science is brilliant at what it does, embodied knowledge never comes through reading a science report. It must come through direct experience.4 If we truly want to understand and make sense of the world, we must be vigilant about being aware in every moment of what we are doing and how we are drawing conclusions.5 We get into trouble when we are divorced from the ground, because then we just keep building up knowledge at the expense of the knowledge that sits right in our heart, in our gut, and in the field between us.6 Dualistic scientific methodology is oftentimes seen not only as an adequate means of investigation, but also at the only one. Leanne Whitney writes that it’s “a massive assumption that the subject–object relation is capable of accounting for life or of understanding it”.7 Knowledge constructed through scientific systems offers a part of knowledge, not the whole of it. They are constructed language that attempt to form relationships. Relationships formed this way are bound by the very human thought processes that isolate and choose which parts to relate. Whitney asks: “How does one describe the infinite, unlimited, and immeasurable using language that is finite, limited, and measured?” The overall integrity of life is compromised when we only focus on its parts. Yet, language can help us realize deeper insight.8 Science is a particular lens humans have constructed to take a look into, and back at, life. Leanne Whitney’s own reservations about the ways in which we habitually perceive through cultural construction prompted her study.9 We can attempt to re-present how life functions, but the original creativity of life in its wholeness cannot be, and will never be, fully re-presented. It’s a huge assumption that we can pull apart life and then put it back to formulate the whole.10
- Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us by Stephen Porges and Seth Porgers. Our bodies ungergo a massive shift when we feel safe. We become healthier and smarter, and generally feel more alive. Trauma changes our bodies. The Polyvagal Theory offers an explanation for how these changes occur, and how to deal with them.
Notes:
1. See Attention as a moral Act: Iain McGilchrist and Jonathan Rowson in Conversation, YouTube, https://youtu.be/YHUGuUhB1c4. Accessed: 2024-01-14. Published: 2023-03-06.
2. David Ellerman makes principled arguments against the rental of human beings. By analogy, inalienable rights invalidate slavery. The same inalienable rights also invalidate the rental of humans. Human rentals bears no more legitimacy than that of human sales. See Abolish Human Rentals, https://www.abolishhumanrentals.org. Accessed: 2024-01-14.
3. Leanne Whitney – Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview, YouTube, https://youtu.be/Lmr8fDEw30Y?t=2665. Accessed: 2024-01-14. Published: 2018-11-11.
4. Leanne Whitney – Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview, YouTube, https://youtu.be/Lmr8fDEw30Yt=5935. Accessed: 2024-01-14. Published: 2018-11-11.
5. Leanne Whitney, Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali.
6. Leanne Whitney – Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview, YouTube, https://youtu.be/Lmr8fDEw30Y?t=1615. Accessed: 2024-01-14. Published: 2018-11-11.
7. Leanne Whitney, Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali.
8. Ibid..
9. Ibid..
10. Ibid..