Recientes investigaciones de científicos tan prestigiosos como Antonio Damasio, nos llevan a la conclusión de que ambas cosas están totalmente interrelacionadas y es más, que la emoción precede a la razón.

Parece ser que primero sentimos las cosas, luego esa información llega a la razón y finalmente la razón vuelve a enviar información a la emoción, formando así una especie de circuito de retroalimentaciones.

Uno de los elementos que participa de estos circuitos es la intuición. La intuición ha sido considerada muchas veces como una especie de información que nos venía no se sabe muy bien de dónde (un sexto sentido, le llamaban algunos y cosas de mujeres, otros) y que nos daba unas informaciones que poco tenían de racionales. Investigadores como Damasio contradicen esta creencia. Según Damasio, la intuición es la condensación, a un nivel no consciente, de múltiples razonamientos e informaciones que aúnan emoción y razón. Es por tanto una fuente riquísima de informaciones, muy completa y también una herramienta muy potente a la hora de tomar decisiones si la sabemos utilizar correctamente. Es también un pozo de creatividad e innovación.

Pero hay que tenerla entrenada. Hemos de aprender a conectar con esa fuente interior de conocimiento, en el que hay condensada gran parte de nuestra experiencia vital y que nos advierte en múltiples ocasiones de cómo debemos actuar en determinadas circunstancias aunque la razón más primaria parezca contradecirla. Ahora sabemos porqué sucede.

¿Escuchas a tu intuición? ¿O crees que debes tomar las decisiones racionalmente? ¿Y cómo te resulta?

Mertxe Pasamontes

]]> http://beautyrealism.wordpress.com/?p=67 Thu, 15 May 2008 16:09:17 +0000 beautyrealism http://beautyrealism.wordpress.com/?p=67 Antonio Damasio distingue entre l'aspect somatique et mental des phénomènes affectifs liés à un objet émotionnellement pertinent : les émotions et les sentiments[1]. D'un côté, les émotions sont définies comme aspect somatique et physiologique ; elles représente l'ensemble de collection de réponses physiologiques induites par des objets émotionnellement compétents provenant de l'environnement ou du milieu interne de l'organisme. De l'autre, les sentiments sont conçus comme une sorte d'image mentale, subjectifs et privés.

Les émotions définies par Damasio inclurent donc deux aspects de l'affectivité : l'arousal et l'expression. Aspect expressif, les émotions sont l'action et le mouvement visible pour autrui lorsqu'elles se manifestent sur le visage, dans la voix et à travers les comportements. Aspect arousal, les émotions sont les phénomènes neurophysiologiques, observables empiriquement par les moyens scientifiques. Les émotions ainsi définies sont en principe publiques et observables à la troisième personne, et peuvent être déclenchés et exécutés à l'insu de l'agent de l'émotion. Elles sont avant tout d'ordre non conscient. Les sentiments ont d'ailleurs les caractéristiques d'être privés, subjectifs et conscients, comme toutes les autres formes de représentations mentales, telles que la pensée, l'information, le savoir ou la connaissance. Les représentations mentales sont privées, parce que seul celui qui le possède peut le voir, comme un film projeté à l'intérieur du cerveau. Les sentiments ainsi définis par Damasio sont les produits issus de l'étape plus élaborée des processus de traitement émotionnel. Ils sont les émotions rendues conscientes. Autrement dit, au stade du sentiment, les émotions, à l'origine somatiques et aveugles, sont éventuellement transformées en images mentales qui nécessitent l'intervention des processus cognitifs de haut niveau.

- Antonio R. Damasio (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion, and consciousness. New York, Harcourt Brace. Trad. Français, Le sentiment même de soi : corps, émotions, conscience. Paris, Odile Jacob.

- Antonio R. Damasio (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain. London, Heinemann. Trad. Français, Spinoza avait raison : joie et tristesse, le cerveau des émotions. Paris, Odile Jacob.

Research by Dr. Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, indicates that body states (with regard to the chemical, visceral, and musculoskeletal) are key factors in the formation of what we call feelings. Because Rolfing makes such profound changes to the musculoskeletal system, it is no wonder that changes in emotional states often result.

An illustration of this body-mind emotional link happens every single day a million times all over the world. Imagine, if you will, a toddler taking off at a clumsy run and catching his toe on an uneven bit of ground. Down he goes. As he raises himself up, his knee is scraped and bruised.

His reaction is one of tremendous emotional significance – crying. Over time, this reaction may be trained out of him by parents or elders, but the initial connection between mind/emotional states and body is obvious from the beginning.

If you're interested in some more details and the specific brain research that is linking mind and body and implicitly showing how powerful structural integration can be, check out "What does structural integration have to do with emotions? (this time with detail!)"

For those interested in learning more about the neuroscience dealing with the old western philosophy of the mind/body split, Damasio's the Feeling of What Happens and Looking for Spinoza are highly recommended reading. The post Mind-body medicine: Why is it so hard to believe? may also be of interest for those interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the mind-body split.

"Someone should start laughing"

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:

How are you?

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:

What is God?

If you think that Truth can be known
From words,

If you think that the Sun and the Ocean

Can pass through that tiny opening
Called the mouth,

O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly
Laughing—Now!

—Hafiz i-Shirazi,
in I Hear God Laughing,
rendered by Daniel Ladinsky

Whenever anyone asks my spouse Jim if he believes in reincarnation, his droll response is: "Not in this lifetime."

It is tempting to use that response as my answer to the title question of this three-part series. Tempting, first of all, because it approaches the question with laughter. Second, because it is confessional: it says merely that nontheism is not the language of my heart, not the language with which I presently describe to myself what sustains me in my interaction with Life. Third, because it is not prescriptive: it leaves the door open for other options.

Nontheist options: One of those options is the nontheism of empirical science and, more specifically, that of the research into the neurobiology of consciousness about which I have written in other posts (here and here, for example).

It doesn't confound me to be told that what I experience as the "self" is what Antonio Damasio calls "a perpetually re-created neurobiological state," a higher order construct maintained by the brain as a framework upon which to organize its neural representations of what the senses perceive (Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, pp. 99-100). Knowing how complex and powerful the workings of human consciousness are, I don't feel that this empirical description diminishes me.

Another option is the curiously analogous nontheism of Buddhism. Here, too, though couched in a very different language than that of Western science, is that core recognition that the "self" is a transient, ever-changing construct. That what is Real is not so much the perceiver as the flow of things perceived.

Both of these models of consciousness have helped me in recent years, as I settle into a more mature way of walking through mortal existence. It is useful to be able to stop, take a breath, and say to myself, "Ah, this is simply the present moment, and all of these insistent thoughts and feelings are simply this organism's efforts to interpret and respond to the moment." Such poise is helpful, whenever I can relax into it.

Private shuddering: Yet there is something else of conscious experience which I miss in these models.

In his richly insightful Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Winter 2007) article, "The Democratic Dilemma," Todd Shy contrasts the approach to liberal morality of Walter Lippmann, writing in the 1920s, with the current approaches of Jim Wallis and Michael Lerner. The passage which resonates most strongly for me is this one:

Wallis's God is the champion of justice and the defender of the poor, but there is nothing about him as compelling as the elusiveness, say, of Luther's God, or the inscrutability of Job's. His God is not a God who hides; his Jesus is never bewildering.

Wallis offers us the clarion morality of the prophets, but not the shifting range of Old Testament experience. The bound child is pulled away from harm, but no knife has been raised by the godly over the ropes. Biblical writers grope to understand a difficult Creator; Wallis seems content with what he knows.

In the end, religion, like our other deep experiences, is disturbing, unsettling, even as it irresistibly holds our devotion. Liberals like Wallis need to engage us on the level of our private shuddering in order to energize our public commitments. After all, the success of religious conservatives is not the raw manipulation of an issue like abortion, but rather the education of congregations to see God as a being who would revolt at the abortion of a fetus.

The portrait of God is all. The rest is just elaboration, which is why Augustine's famous quip, love God and do whatever you want, makes utter sense to the religious conservative, who wouldn't dream of intentionally abusing it, precisely as Augustine knew. (p.70)

"On the level of our private shuddering." That phrase pierces to the heart of our collective dilemma over the marriage of belief and action.

Wherever we are on the spectrum of belief, what we tell ourselves we believe—or disbelieve—can both drive and constrain our actions. Yet on the level of our private shuddering, a level at once more visceral and more spiritual than belief, something else drives and constrains us.

At its best, we do not know rationally yet are still convinced—on the level of our private shuddering—that whatever drives and constrains us is Something Else which is larger than any one or several of us.

Or at least we hope for that.

Belief versus faith: I know I confess to both shuddering and hope in the tales on Walhydra's Porch. Though emotionally challenging, it is ultimately easier for me to give voice to both on that blog, simply because the intent there is storytelling.

Here on The Empty Path, where the intent is rational discussion, such topics are much more difficult to address. Reason insists upon the sort of precise correspondence between words and their denotations which is impossible in the realm of the Spirit. That realm demands poetry.

Part of what helps me is the distinction I make between belief and faith. Belief focuses on statements; faith, on actions. These are not mutually exclusive categories, yet I don't need to have worked out a definitive statement of belief in order to live moment by moment on faith.

But what in the world am I talking about?

Survival faith and practice: In Part II, I wrote that "the challenges of the past decade have increasingly imposed upon me a different sort of spiritual economy," what I call "survival faith and practice."

I coined that phrase last October, well into the clinical depression which had been sneaking up on me since at least a year earlier.

As the Walhydra stories linked here relate, September of 2006 was when I first admitted to myself that my brilliant, compassionate mother was probably slipping into Alzheimer's dementia ("In which Walhydra reconsiders").

By March of last year, my sister and brother and I knew it was no longer safe for Mom to live alone, and we moved her to my sister's home in Pensacola ("Which next thing?"). By June, Mom's obvious decline was confounding me with grief, even while I struggled with anxiety over handling her legal matters and finances and the need to sell her home from 300 miles away ("Walhydra's sadness").

Shortly after I published Part II, I began the strange adventure—doubly strange for a former clinical counselor—of using anti-depressants and short-term therapy to climb back out of the depths ("Walhydra's year of becoming mortal" and "Is it Spring yet?").

Sharing this personal context is essential to demonstrating what I mean about faith.

Spiritual discipline: As my depression deepened over the past year, both practical and emotional necessity drove me to seek a more intense focus for my spiritual discipline. As I tell it in "Walhydra's year of becoming mortal,"

[Walhydra] finally recognized just how much of her energy and concentration it was taking each day to tightrope walk with equanimity between anxiety and despair.

"Hell!" Walhydra says. "It's taking concentration just to make myself get out of bed in the morning...let alone do tai chi foundations, sitting meditation, bike riding, prayer, breakfast, or any of those other things which might nudge me toward wanting to do another day."

Eventually, I saw the depression for what it was. Describing the deaths of father-in-law and friends and the decline of my elderly parents, I wrote:

This is not just temperament, or circumstance. This is Walhydra's own personal version of what every human being faces: death and the certainty of death.

It's enough to make one want to be beyond feeling.

And that, Walhydra now realizes, is what she has actually been working on in her haphazard morning rituals over the past year: trying to be "beyond feeling."

She hasn't been denying causes of grief or fear, yet she's been trying to avoid the slippery slope of melancholia. In the process, her brain has done what that organ knows how to do: suppress its own chemistry until Walhydra was deep in depression.

Applied nontheism: In my desperate efforts to regain stability (at least momentary) before I began taking anti-depressants, and in my much more successful efforts since, I can observe the combined application of those two nontheisms I described earlier.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (aka SSRI anti-depressants) help the brain to reestablish neurochemical homeostasis, so that disturbances from the environment or from imagination do not disable thinking and choice with emotional reactions which are way out of scale. There (grossly oversimplified) is the nontheism of neurobiology.

Taoist tai chi practice, zazen meditation and the disciplines of prayer I've learned from Quaker silent worship help consciousness to observe and let go of the flow of thoughts and feelings, without needing to react to or act upon any of them. There (grossly oversimplified) is the nontheism of Buddhism.

I can and do rely upon a discipline of mindfulness informed by both neurobiology and Buddhist psychology, whenever I remember to calm consciousness and recenter it in the moment. This is a discipline of maturity for which I am very grateful.

Something Else: However, on the level of my private shuddering, I am far more grateful for Something Else. Whether I am in the midst of turmoil and despair or settled into the stillness and poise of the moment, I am not alone.

Here is where reason falters, where I have to shift to mythopoetic language in order to suggest what I cannot define.

In Part I, I described becoming "a refugee from the 'christian' world" after I came out as a gay man and left Lutheran seminary in 1973.

On one level, the search I began then is for a living, breathing coherence in personal belief. What is the true character of God and our relationship with God, when orthodoxy condemns the homosexual love I have come to understand as a God-given blessing rather than a curse in my life? What is the true nature of salvation, when orthodoxy denies it to non-believers?

On a deeper level, as I acknowledged at the end of Part II, my coming out of Christian orthodoxy is a somewhat uncomfortable search for a way around the notion of "obeying God's will"---or, better, a search for a living, breathing version of obedience which I can affirm and practice. What if those who reject homosexuals and non-believers are right? Or, if they are not, how do I perceive and follow that real "God's will" which is beyond orthodoxies?

On the deepest level, the level of my private shuddering, my search is for what Thomas Merton calls "the possibility of an uninterrupted dialogue with God...a dialogue of love and of choice. A dialogue of deep wills" (New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 16-17).

In other words, a search for relationship, not with "God" as learned from and defined by others, but with Divine Presence as experienced in consciousness, unmediated by words and concepts.

Recall Todd Shy's words quoted earlier: "The portrait of God is all."

In the depth of depression, as I was finishing Part II, I reached the following passage in my reading of Merton's New Seeds:

In all the situations of life the "will of God" comes to us not merely as an external dictate of impersonal law but above all as an interior invitation of personal love.

Too often the conventional conception of "God's will" as a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leads men to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love. Such a view of the divine will drives human weakness to despair and one wonders if it is not, itself, often the expression of a despair too intolerable to be admitted to conscious consideration.

These arbitrary "dictates" of a domineering and insensible Father are more often seeds of hatred than of love. If that is our concept of the will of God, we cannot possibly seek the obscure and intimate mystery of the encounter that takes place in contemplation. We will desire only to fly as far as possible from Him and hide from His face forever.

So much depends on our idea of God! Yet no idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him" (p. 17).

Yes, yes, and yes.

In future posts I will tell more about myself by writing more about the idea of God. For now, in saying that I am not a nontheist, what I am acknowledging is that I have made peace with and understood the value of my "native religious language."

It is the mythopoetic language in which I first learned to conceptualize and describe the experience of "the Divine." It is not a language for definition—certainly not for doctrinal formulation. It is, rather, a language for evoking spiritual shuddering.

As I wrote in "Is it Spring yet?":

In the past few years, though, Walhydra has been looking for the pre-theological core of her faith, her spiritual enthusiasm [from Greek enthous, entheos, possessed, inspired : en-, in + theos, god].

Guess what? She found its roots in the positive visceral childhood experiences of Lutheran Sunday School, her father's sermons, her mother's organ-playing, and the hymn-singing of the congregation's old ladies.

What an interesting surprise!

This actually makes sense, though. Ever since childhood, the real Jesus—who is far more real than any of the "Christianities" seem able to express—has been Walhydra's hero.

Walhydra imbibed all of those Sunday School stories and sermons and hymns, to the point that Jesus became a real presence for her, a divine human of fierce integrity and fierce compassion. Whenever anyone makes false claims in his name, he lets her know. More to the point, whenever Walhydra causes harm or tries to hide, he lets her know.

Another way to say this is that my faith is not about what I believe but about what I trust.

When I am in turmoil or despair, my child's heart turns to a personified Divine Presence, to a "God" who, as Frederick Buechner writes, is "a God like Jesus, which is to say a God of love" ("The Clown in the Belfrey," in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, p. 125).

When I am poised in sacred stillness, I feel the joy of "being right with God, trusting the deep-down rightness of the life God has created for us and in us, and riding that trust the way a red-tailed hawk rides the currents of the air" (Ibid., p. 127).

In between these times, I experience the constant shifting of my trust, my faith. As Buechner writes:

Some days it's easier to say Yes than other days. And even when we say Yes, there's always a no lurking somewhere in the shadows, just as when we say no there's always a Yes. That's the way faith breathes in and breathes out, I think, the way it stays alive and grows. (Ibid., p. 129)

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Emozioni.piuchepuoi.it

http://emozioni.piuchepuoi.it/26/emozioni-per-decidere/

How Do Customers' Process Experiences and Make Decisions?

People generally have a gut feel for the situations they are in and what they want to do.  In these situations, customers' may have already subconsciously made a provisional decision before they even begin to consciously and rationally consider tradeoffs and their ability to justify that decision.

The leading neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, has made a series of surprising discoveries regarding the extent to which subconscious feelings are a precursor to rational thinking.  In an ingenious experiment, Damasio demonstrated that subconsciously generated physical changes in the body significantly precede a person's deliberate and rational thinking. (See Iowa Gambling Task)

In this experiment, participants were given four decks of cards along with $2,000 in play money.  The participants were told that each time they chose a card they will either win or lose money.  The goal was to win as much as possible.  What the participants didn't know is that the game was rigged.  Two of the decks were "high risk decks" with larger payouts and much larger losses.  The other two decks were "low risk decks" with smaller payouts but even smaller losses.  If participants consistently drew from the low risk decks, they would end up way ahead in the end.

As expected, participant's initial card selection was random; they had no reason to favor any of the four decks.  On average, participants turned over approximately 50 cards before they began to draw more consistently from the low risk decks.  It took about 80 cards before the average participant could explain why he was drawing from these two decks.  However, the most interesting part of the experiment was that Damasio had attached electrodes to the participants' palms.  These electrodes measured electrical conductance of the skin which correlates with nervousness.  Damasio found that, after only 10 cards, participants began to show signs of stress when reaching for a card from one of the high risk decks!   As signs of stress began to increase, the participants started to draw more frequently from the low risk decks.  The most interesting observation about these findings is that the participants began to have a preconscious feel for the game 40 cards before they consciously recognized what was happening and 70 cards before they could articulate the reasons why.

This experiment illustrates an experience that occurs on three different levels: 1) subconscious and automatic reactions, 2) deliberate planning and action, and 3) reflective thinking.  These three levels correspond with a model created by the brilliant cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky.  Along with Seymour Papert, Minksy has developed a modular theory of the mind (called "The Society of Mind") that attempts to explain how intelligence can emerge from the interaction of large numbers of non-intelligent agents.  (See:  The Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine).  In essence, the mind can be modeled as the integration of a reactive layer (A-Brain), a deliberative layer (B-Brain), and a reflective layer (C-Brain).  This is illustrated as follows: 

• The A-Brain (Reactive Level) is the only part of the brain that receives signals directly from the external world. The A-Brain continuously predicts what will happen next and compares the signals it receives to these predictions. If there is a significant difference between the prediction and the actual signals, the A-Brain reacts by shifting attention, making muscles move, and/or stimulating systems that affect the person's level of physical arousal. This A-Brain has no sense for what external events "mean." It just responds with some combination of instinctual and learned reactions:
  • Instinctual reactions include automatic physical responses to sensations of temperature, hunger, thirst, pain, etc... It includes things like quickly removing your hand from a hot surface or focusing on finding food when you're hungry.
  • Learned reactions can include everything from jumping out of the way of a moving car, to executing the sort of automatic behavioral scripts involved in driving a car, playing an instrument, making coffee in the morning. Learned reactions also include a wide range of subconscious associations with environmental clues... like the physical stress reaction you have when you hear someone you care about talk to you in "that tone of voice."
• The B-Brain (Deliberative Level) is connected in such a way that it can receive signals from the A-Brain and can respond by sending signals to the A-Brain. However, B has no direct connection to the external world. The signals that the B-Brain receives from the A-Brain are often focused on differences between the A-Brain's predictions and what it sensed in the real world. The B-Brain then interprets what the A-Brain senses but mistakes these interpretations for the real thing. The B-Brain does not realize that what it perceives are not real objects in the external world but are merely events that occur in the A-Brain itself." In addition, the B-Brain cannot directly perform any physical action on it's own but it can influence the way A reacts. The B-Brain is responsible for our ability to achieve more complex goals. It applies all sorts of knowledge in order to create and carry out more elaborate plans. This knowledge is accumulated and generalized from personal experience and what we learn from others.
• The C-Brain (Reflective Level) supervises the B-Brain while the B-Brain is dealing with the A-Brain world. Reflective thinking often begins when our usual strategies start to fail. The brain is able to reformulate and reframe its interpretation of the situation in a way that may lead to more creative and effective strategies. The C-Brain includes several levels of processing:
  • Reflection: The C-Brain reflects on it's recollection of thoughts in the B-Brain. This includes predictions that turned out wrong, plans that encountered obstacles, and failures to access or apply the knowledge that was needed.
  • Self-Reflection: The C-Brain reflects not only on the thoughts of the B-Brain but on the self that had those thoughts. Self-reflection incorporates our model of our self with our model of the external world. For example, a person might recognize that, in the course of doing something, he's stuck or confused. This may lead them him to recognize that: his plans have gone off track, he's paying attention to too many details, or he's pursuing a goal that could be revised. This self-reflection leads to a shift in perspective that allows people to work around obstacles.
  • Self-Conscious Reflection: The C-Brain also reflects on how well our actions match the values, ideals, taboos, and identify we apply to ourselves. In order to do that, the brain must have built models about the kinds of ideas and behavior one ought to have.

The interaction of these three brains creates something that Minsky calls the "Immanence Illusion."  People have the illusion that their experience is unfolding in real-time because as they processes signals from the outside world, they are also recalling and creating a comprehensive array of predictions about what they will experience.  Whenever a real object appears before their eyes, its full description is instantly available.  "Our sense of momentary mental time is flawed; our vision-agencies begin arousing memories before their own work is fully done."  Perceptions can evoke our memories so quickly that we can't distinguish what we've seen or heard from what we've been led to recollect.

"We don't see things as they are.  We see things as we are."  Anais Nin

Implications for Experience Design

The implications for experience design are profound!  At one level, the clues that customers pick up from the experience must be roughly aligned to fit with the way their reactive, A-Brain processes the signals from the world.  At the same time, the most compelling experiences include a small number of clues that are deliberately designed to get the customers' attention; to create an "orienting response" and shape their reflective, C-Brain.  The trick is to deliberately design an experience that naturally maps to customers' automatic behavioral reactions while reserving a very small number of salient differences; things we call "Signature Experience Elements."

The place to start is by understanding customers' reactive, A-Brain processes.  One of the ways to do this is to map out their Automatic Behavioral Scripts.  These automatic behavioral scripts are like little subroutines that brains execute in a way that enables people to accomplish predictable tasks without thinking too much about them.   If you're like most people, you have automatic behavioral scripts for tasks like:  driving to work, getting a cup of coffee, going to the bank to make a deposit, etc...  You can accomplish these tasks on "automatic pilot"... allowing you to pay attention to more pressing matters.  So, when you go to the bank branch to make a deposit at lunch, you can be thinking about your meetings this afternoon or what you'll do this evening.

Unfortunately, most companies do exactly the opposite.  They interrupt their customers' automatic behavioral scripts.  For example: frequent changes to a travel company's online storefront interrupts the automatic behavioral scripts of their frequent travelers; or a bank that "greets" customers as they come in to the branch to make a deposit creating a valueless distraction from their customers' "doing it on automatic pilot" activity and interrupting their train of thought on the six other things that were more of a priority.   In addition, if you're going to do something different (get the customers' attention; interrupt their train of thought; create an "orienting response"), you'd better make it good!  Most companies have a hard time being creative and focused on the small set of things that will actually make a difference to customers... and be consistent with a differentiated brand story.  So, as a result, the actual experience customers have with many companies can be summarized as varying degrees of being difficult to do business with.

Beyond fitting with the customers' reactive, A-Brain processes, the next challenge is to create a small number of Signature Experience Elements that get the customers' attention and are aligned to tell a story that works with how they make decisions (deliberative, B-Brain process) and consider the meaning of the experiences they have (reflective, C-Brain process).  For example, Whole Foods Market has a small number of signature experience elements that reinforce their "Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet" positioning and are perceived by customers' as a difference in kind.  These include:  organic food, artful food presentation, local growers, educational signage, novelty seeking selection, and premium pricing.

For the past several years, we've been working with clients on designing a small set of "Signature Experience Elements" that customers will perceive as a "difference in kind" and that fit with the overarching purpose of the organization.  Typically we design to no more than 5-7 Signature Elements that are aligned with the purpose or story the experience is trying to tell.  Another client example is a major jewelry store chain, whose brand story is "The Perfect Gift, Guaranteed."  This company's signature elements included:  a distinctive welcome, creative and consultative gift advice, coaching the customer on how to romance the gift, and a wow process for returns.  Each of these signature elements was designed to get the customers attention and contribute to them really internalizing the desired brand story.

In "The Virgin of Hollywood, Florida," Walhydra groused at length about the gullibility of "the masses," who blithely toss their belief after every tabloid headline, urban legend, or political sound bite.

Yet she found herself wondering: "How does one move from scorn for the credulous to a working, sustaining faith for oneself?"

I thank my correspondent for sending me back to read this piece again. Becoming audience to my own writing jolted me back into the present moment for which I've been longing.

This morning, I got a welcome jolt from another direction.

Elsewhere I've referred to Antonio Damasio's book Decartes' Error, the first of a remarkable trilogy of books in which the author explicates the field of neurobiology's current understanding of how human consciousness works.

In this first book, Damasio demonstrates how Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum misses the organic reality of the workings of the brain. The brain, in fact, must make direct use of the information it receives through the emotions in order to be able to do any sort of reasoning.

In other words, the West's classic elevation of reason as higher than and independent of emotion does not match biological reality. The two must and do work in tandem.

My jolt this morning, however, comes from a different writer's take on Descartes. In New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton writes the following:

Nothing could be more alien to contemplation than the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. "I think, therefore I am." This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence (!) based on the observation that he "thinks." If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being.

At the same time, by also reducing God to a concept, he makes it impossible for himself to have any intuition of the divine reality which is inexpressible. He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some "thing" alien to himself. And he proves that the "thing" exists. He convinces himself: "I am therefore some thing." And then he goes on to convince himself that God, the infinite, the transcendent, is also a "thing," an "object," like other finite and limited objects of our thought!

Contemplation, on the contrary, is the experiential grasp of reality as subjective, not so much "mine" (which would signify "belonging to the external self") but "myself" in existential mystery. Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God.

For the contemplative there is no cogito ("I think") and no ergo ("therefore") but only SUM, I AM. Not in the sense of a futile assertion of our individuality as ultimately real, but in the humble realization of our mysterious being as persons in whom God dwells, with infinite sweetness and inalienable power. (9-10)

Damasio might well highlight this clause: "If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence...."

From the perspective of neurobiology, thought is an organic process of the brain which does, indeed, create the construct of a "self," in order to map and make more efficacious use of the higher order information it stores. The self only "exists" as the transient constellation of these maps of information...and ceases when the body ceases.

For me this morning, the jolt was in the second clause of that sentence: "...then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being."

When I do manage to center down through my own noise, what remains is a consciousness, an awareness, an awakeness. The brain simply watching and waiting. 

I am not saying that this awakeness is itself God.

Yet I suspect—and Merton seems to be suggesting—that for any and all of us who experience it, this non-selfconscious awareness is the "space" wherein we come closest to That which we tend to call "God."

I don't want to analyze this too much right now. As Merton writes, the key is experience, not analysis.

SUM.

And so it is.

Blesséd Be,
Michael

Over the past three decades, I have taken refuge in the paradoxical religious life of a solitaire.

My faith and practice are rooted in the Christ-centeredness of my Lutheran upbringing and Quaker convincement, yet they are also profoundly influenced by Paganism and Buddhism. The paradox rests in this: I have a faith-led life for which belonging in community is essential, yet I cannot participate in community confessions or rituals which fail to resonate with my inner sense of what is true.

How does one sustain and advance such a life? How does one maintain both personal authenticity and authentically committed involvement in community?

I came to Quakerism because I recognized that such paradoxes are explicitly acknowledged and embraced in the Quaker tradition. Now I see these questions being visited anew in Quaker and allied non-Quaker dialogs online, in print and within and across religious communities.

In future posts, I want to go deeper into these paradoxes. For the remainder of this post, though, I want to describe three needs of human consciousness which remind even solitaires like myself that we cannot be human without other people.

Discerning what is real: The first challenge is that the human brain, as part of its normal functioning, creates, stores, retrieves and intermingles representations [see note] of both material world experiences and imagined experiences. The latter are representations which the brain pieces together from its inner repertoire of sensations, symbols and significances, and which it presents to consciousness as if they might actually have happened or could happen.

Without ongoing communication with other people, I cannot learn how to distinguish adequately between material and imagined experiences.

Granted, as I mature in attentiveness, I may become more disciplined in making such distinctions. However, no child can come to have such full and effective use of human consciousness without interaction with others, without receiving experience-based guidance and feedback from successful peers and elders.

As an important aside, I should note that both material and imagined experiences are real. That is, both have real effect on the brain's perception and interpretation of its life. Both have real influence on how I understand myself and how I interact with my environment and with other people.

The all-important process of reality-checking, which for sanity's sake I must learn from others, is not about saying that the material is real and the imagined, unreal. It is about discerning from which sort of reality a given experience arises.

Learning language: The second challenge arises because the faculty of imagination is, in fact, essential if the brain is to reach its full human potential for dealing with both outer and inner reality. The brain must accomplish increasing levels of abstraction: from neurological representations of sensory experience, to representations of categories of experience, to representations of possible changes and interactions among categories, and so on.

In other words, it must be able to name and conceptualize. It must learn language. And it is other human beings who introduce the infant primate to the experience of language.

I will return in future posts to how language both aids and confounds faith and practice and the sharing of faith and practice. The key point here is that the native language I share with those who first taught me becomes increasingly less exact and effective, the less material and more abstract the experience about which we strive to communicate.

Sharing companionship: The third challenge is even more basic and visceral than the human need for imagination or language.

We need company. We need nurture and affection and companionship. It is undeniable that we primates are hard-wired as social animals. At our healthiest and sanest, we live by sharing and cooperation, not by solitary foraging or predation.

Acknowledging this third challenge leads me full circle back to the paradox with which I began this post. I cannot be a solitaire alone. I must have deep, caring interaction with other people in order to sustain myself as a sane and healthy animal, in order to continue to discern what is real, and in order to be able to give expression, either inwardly or outwardly, to what I discern.

And that last points up another paradox. If I experience something and cannot express it, my ability to integrate it into my faith and practice is stymied. However, if I focus my attention on trying to express inexpressible experience, I lose the flow with which Spirit waters my life.

I come back, then, to the divine invitation to be in the present moment—but with an added dimension: the invitation is to be in the present moment with other people, as well as alone.

Even when we cannot agree about how to express what we experience. Even when we cannot trust for certain that we share the same experience or, worse, fear that our experiences contradict each other.

Again I come back to the divine affirmation: when you and I are together in faithful attentiveness, what saves and restores us is not attention to"you" or to "me" but attention to the Divine Presence.

And so it is.

Blesséd Be,
Michael

Note: I am borrowing—and grossly oversimplifying— Antonio Damasio's usage of the term "representations" in Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Viking Penguin, 1994, reprinted 2005) and later works.

Damasio's research and writing are pivotal in explicating our growing understanding of the neurobiological basis and functioning of human consciousness.