intellectual or other-wise

Carl Gustav Jung

Enantiodromia is the fancy name for the tendency of thinking to polarize and to swing between ‘either’ and ‘or’. Heraclitus noticed it in ancient Greece and Jung was familiar with it more recently. It would have been functional in ancestral times and is thus possibly hard wired into our brain circuits.

When confronted by an ambiguous stimulus (eg a rustle in the grass) it is expedient to make a quick and clear decision (either lion or the wind) rather than getting paralysis by analysis while lingering in mental and physical uncertainty. Note in passing – pessimists are more likely to survive than optimists.

I have recently been unpicking some of the enantiodromias that deal with how we use our minds:

•    Either intellectual or emotional.
•    Either rational or intuitive.
•    Either scientific or artistic.
•    Either thinking or feeling
•    Either intentional or spontaneous
•    Either academic or arty-farty
•    Either hard or soft
•    Either head or heart.
•    Either conscious or unconscious

I was encultured to think of myself as a hard headed, academic and intellectual scientist driven by conscious intentions.

By enantiodromia I was thus not a soft hearted, spontaneous, intuitive, arty-farty artist driven by emotions and feelings from the unconscious.

BUT – the enantiodromias are simple minded. They do not accord with the ‘reality’ that appears (a) in the new literature that embraces enantiodromia breaking consilience regarding neurology and evolutionary psychology, and (b) in my attention centre when formally engaged in mindfulness.

Blaise Pascal

An early and life changing experience during mindfulness meditation is the realization that the conscious mind is not in charge of what goes on in the mind/brain. Blaise Pascal, from his 17th century Jesuit perspective, famously noted that “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing about.” This can be usefully restated as –

“An individual mind/brain complex has its reasons that consciousness knows nothing about.”

The reasons relate to intentions. And intentions relate to hot reactions or cool responses to changes in the internal or external environment. And the patterns of embodiment of the reactions and responses will be controlled and constrained ultimately by the genetic hard wired mental framework as this is filled out by cultural learning and by chance.

Cephalized earthworm

Many mind/brain systems have evolved. The general pattern is of cephalisation. The brain tissue becomes concentrated as an organ at the front of the body where it is close to the main sense organs. The basic pattern is true for such diverse life forms as worms, snails and insects and obviously for the vertebrates.

In animals the bodily functions such as digesting food, breathing, urinating, moving, reproducing and so on are catered for unconsciously. Animals do not ‘know’ they are doing such things and neither do they need to. The unconscious is wise enough to do what needs to be done.

This raises an interesting question. If the unconscious is ‘wise’’ enough to look after all those life processes - what is the purpose of consciousness? We can imagine a sequence:

The unconscious is always present. It can be on its own – as in most of the single celled animals – or it can be associated with some degree of consciousness. But why? What is the added advantage of consciousness? What is its structure and function? There is talk of self consciousness and this infers a type of non-self consciousness. Mysterious! I recently recorded some thoughts about this:

•    http://naesaebad.blogspot.com/2013/03/levels-of-consciousness.html
•    http://naesaebad.blogspot.com/2013/03/renunciation-is-in-our-plastic-genes.html

I feel no need to fill in the details of that intellectual story line at the moment. The fact is that I am an English speaker with a particular personality type and learning style, and brainwashed in a typical sub cultural pattern. I am thus to some extent a programmed robot who has functioned for many years as a reprogrammer of other minds – first school kids then education support staff.

The rhetoric was that I was facilitating learning and encouraging others to think for themselves. But in fact I was leading them through a curriculum of collective wisdom and spoon feeding them with the conventional wisdom of the dominant group (COWDUNG). I was part of the hegemonic system and I was wielding elegant power. I was churning out biddable wage slaves and cannon fodder.

BUT – for some reason I relished the rhetoric of free thinking enlightenment; of uncommon sense and of counterintuition. Unfortunately, for some of my formative years and for many of my professional ones, I was waging war using the wisdom of the intellect. It took some time to realize that this involved throwing petrol on the flames and that there was need of an enantiodromic swing to some other way of being wise. SO what did that entail?

Briefly – sit still in body and pay attention to attention.

• Learn that reality is a frame of mind that passes. 
• Learn that worldviews and viewpoints are mind made using language and that they pass. 
• Learn that the unconscious is in charge and that it can be tamed and encouraged to speak when the muse is numinously in the zone. AND, crucially, 
• learn that peace and compassion are our hard wired birth right at least amongst ‘us’ if not amongst ‘them’. But ‘us’ can expand to take in the cosmos. 

So there is the wisdom of the intellect and the other-wise