Aphantasia. That is an interesting word. What does it mean?
Imagine a scene for a moment. You are on your last vacation, sitting in front of the hotel or cottage and watching the sunset.
If you had to say how intense the image is that you see of this sunset in your mind’s eye, would it be blurry or even a moving movie? Or do you see no image at all?
There are all shades of experience. Certain people are transported back to the scene and almost can’t distinguish it from the event at the time, so vivid and colorful does everything seem. Others see shadows. I see – nothing.
This is aphantasia. A blind mind’s eye.
The word has nothing to do with the fact that I have no imagination, as my children could confirm.
But how do you live with aphantasia?
I have learned about my aphantasia only recently. After all, I can only infer the inner life of others from mine, and how could I know that others can see pictures and movies in their heads? Not a topic to talk about over dinner spontaneously.
I have found that I have a harder time remembering episodic events. While others remember the clothes and the room with its furnishings, I have a hard time even remembering that I experienced them, when I experienced them, and with whom I experienced them.
On the other hand, I have an excellent memory for factual knowledge.
It is difficult to explain how I think. I see no images, hear no voices, perceive no smells or tastes, and no touch except with my physical sensory organs. Very rarely do I hear music in my head.
I would best describe my thoughts like this: on the one hand, there are hunches and impressions, on the other hand, words. The words are absolutely in the minority.
What does this mean for my coaching?
I can think of one point in particular where my aphantasia could have an impact: the ability to put myself in your shoes.
Empathy happens through emotions. You empathize by feeling with the other. According to Lisa Feldman Barrel, emotions are sensory perceptions enriched by memories.
So I perceive my surroundings and my body, and interpret what that perception might mean by drawing on my memory.
She tells a story that illustrates this very well.
Although she was not attracted to a fellow student in college, she went on a date. During this date, she felt woozy, her knees gave out, and she had queasy feelings in her stomach.
She interpreted this to mean that she obviously did like the young man and had a nine-month relationship with him.
However, she disregarded that she was suffering from the flu for the next few days after the date. What she thought were romantic feelings were the first signs of an illness.
From this definition of emotion, I conclude that empathy has more to do with similar memories than a true ability to feel what others feel. Shared memories help to not only make conclusions from oneself to others.
But it also helps to be similarly knit. Similar cultural imprinting, history and personality structure result in similar interpretations of sensory impressions as emotions.
Sensory impressions here do not have to come explicitly from the environment or the body in real-time. The brain makes little – some say no – distinction between thought-play, memory replay and experience.
A strong imagination through the inner eye or ear, taste, touch can trigger the same emotions. By reliving, our memories are strengthened, more easily recalled, but also romanticized or amplified, in any case slightly altered.
These strengthened, altered memories then flow back more often into the interpretation of new events, along with any associations that the current situation triggers.
So, in summary, empathy works best when I have experienced a lot with the person I am coaching, they are similar to me, and I already know similar situations to theirs from my own experience.
However, the CliftonStrengths and Spiral Dynamics tools show us how fundamentally different we are. It is precisely the realization of modernity and postmodernity how individual we are. Of course, we overlap in our humanity, which makes empathy possible. But how deep does this really go?
I cannot give this answer, because, with my aphantasia, I lack essential building blocks of empathy in particular. On the other hand, I am highly gifted and neuroatypical, which contributes to the fact that my experience is usually substantially different from that of others.
I had to find a different approach for empathy.
How about using my strength in learning, thinking, and knowing to understand other people better?
So I read everything I could get my hands on about personality and development.
When a person tells me something, I see how their strength profile, worldview, and Enneagram type might well interpret that event. This allows me to ask specific questions and empathize with that person much better.
A second important aspect arises from this. Because I am not wallowing in my own memories or picturing the often difficult situation very vividly, which can lead to great emotion, I am less trapped.
I can remain an observer, react less from my own conclusions, but also react less emotionally. This allows me to see ways out, solutions, triggers and misinterpretations much better.
Of course, empathy is not presenting solutions. But empathy is also not sitting wallowing in the problem with a lot of compassion and doing navel-gazing.
Coaching is about developing solutions yourself with the help of surprising, thought-provoking impulses from the coach. A compassionate yet analytical observer can be very helpful.
One more point: emotional reminders often create a sense of familiarity, accomplishment, and belonging. They make it much harder to disengage from a behavior, a worldview, and even a person.
Aphantasia, therefore, makes it easier to break away from certain thinking patterns. For example, when the hierarchy of one’s values changes, there is much less to hold one back.
But also, interestingly, new things can often be thought of more imaginatively. The memory of interpreted signals from our physical eye usually limits our inner eye.
Imagining the proverbial pink elephant succeeds because we only combine two concepts we know, even if the combination does not exist in the real world.
Now what if the imagination were not limited to the same extent because it would not automatically create an image of the mind games we make?
Of course, it becomes tricky when we have to explain, put into words or visualize these free thoughts and new concepts to share. But as a starting point or intermediate step, they can lead to imaginative and unexpected new concrete solutions.
I admit: aphantasia limits me. But at the same time, it expands the possibilities I have. I would not want to miss them.
I would happily put it at your service during a coaching session.
James Lindsay claims that Woke is Maoism with Western characteristics. Mao himself called his theory Marxism with Chinese characteristics.
He also uses biology to make this more clear. We have genus and species in the taxonomy of the biological universe.
We could say that genus is the concept, while a specific species manifests the concept in one concrete form.
We could call Marxism, communism, Maoism, Woke, Critical Race Theory, and Queer Theory species of a common genus.
While “cats” is the genus, tiger, lion, and house cat are some species. We could now define cats as having a tail, but then there are lynx and bobcats.
Thus, we can always expect that people will doubt the common genus by pointing to distinct differences between species.
What, then, would be the characteristics of the genus that includes all these different species?
Marx looked at culture and defined it as flawed and needing deconstruction. He identified economics as the driving and defining force of culture and the lever to change culture. Deprive the ruling class of its lever to power, and you can redefine culture.
All the above theories have this in common: They see current culture needing deconstruction. They define a lever or means of power and then turn against the people with access to that power.
Look at Critical Race Theory. The lever to power is whiteness or white privilege. For Queer Theory, it’s being straight, or as they call it, cis-gendered.
To bind all these theories together, we have intersectionality. This allows white people to escape from the class of white privilege by defining themselves as non-cis.
To call these theories destructive would not do them full justice. They all believe that once the class, race, or gender in power is deprived of their privilege, they would administrate and use the newly gained power in more mature, just and egalitarian ways. The new lever of power would be equity.
Historical examples of utter failure, with revolution creating a new class of suppressors, are dismissed as poorly done or incorrectly identifying the problem and the lever.
In short, Marx was wrong in saying it’s about capital, and thus the wrong kind of people came out on top in the aftermath of the revolution.
Each of the above theories claims to know now, and therefore, they would succeed in ushering in the utopia of equity in two steps—a claim Jordan Peterson equates to narcissism.
Which would be the two steps?
First, we would see the benevolent dictatorship of those not in power before, which would automatically lead to an equity-based society without hierarchy and leadership.
What makes these theories appealing to some is this:
They promise revenge on the privileged without calling it that.
They are often correct in their analysis of the problem.
They play with the compassion and need for belonging people have.
People respond to these theories often by doubling down on their worldview, going to the trenches for it, and only acknowledging the correct analysis in part, if not outright denying it. It is easy to dismiss a problem if the proposed solution is illogical or inapplicable. But that results in the original problems not being addressed.
I can’t help but think of the Theory of Positive Disintegration when I look at the proposed solution.
Unilevel disintegration, as level II is called in TPD, in simple terms, is this: a person feels dissonance with their subculture and looks to solve it by looking for another qualitatively similar subculture.
All of the above theories identify power distribution as the main problem with the existing culture. Their solution is the redistribution of power, a solution of similar quality.
Granted, they hope this will prepare the culture to reach their ideal, but they have no plan. Sounds like an inkling of level III, multilevel spontaneous disintegration.
To be fair, their opponents seem like people that try to draw back those that feel the dissonance into primary integration.
The path forward would be to distill these elements from all these theories:
Where are they correct in their analysis of the problem?
Which elements of their solutions intuitively represent this inkling of an ideal that could constitute a higher path?
To do so will need a lot of humility and courage because one will be between a rock and a hard place, hated by both camps. But it might be the only path to bring humanity into the next stage.
Let me give you an example.
Wokeism is trying to destroy the existing culture by stating that all truth is subjective, including things like 2 2=4.
They use different ways to prove that depending on the species. Some say that math is a construct of white supremacy and forced on minorities.
There are quite a few loopholes in that, as math is based on Arab numbers with the addition of zero from India. The other is that what is a minority in the US does not have to be one worldwide. But anyway.
Others argue that we can never know absolute truth because as soon as we perceive it, we filter it through our own experience and distort it.
This argument makes much more sense, but it makes something absolute that is not.
Let’s have a look at subjective knowing. There are things that we can only know subjectively because there is no way to measure them against facts. Religions are subject to that on a grand scale. “There is a God” cannot be proven, only believed. Other kinds of subjective knowing are opinions and suppositions.
My acceptance of the existence of God stems from my experience, and experience undoubtedly is subjective.
Subjective knowing can become objective if there are means to measure what we believe or facts that can be tested.
It is essential to recognize that the statement that there is a God carries an objective and even an absolute truth. It is either true or false, we just do not know.
Subjective truth is the truth of which the subject is convinced. It is based on a mixture of objective and subjective knowledge. It is either objectively true or false.
The fallacy of postmodern subjectivism is that it makes subjective knowing the only way of knowing, and as everything is socially constructed, even the only source of truth. Thus, all truth has to be subjective.
I am sure I am oversimplifying and will leave a lot of room to be criticized. So be it.
Just because postmodernity has made this leap of thought, turning subjective knowing into subjective truth as the only existing truth by a slide of hands, do we have to eliminate the concept of subjective knowing?
Historically, starting in the 15th century, thinkers started to find new methods of finding objective truth, namely the scientific method. They wanted to gradually move away from the absolute truth given by the authorities.
Soon after that, in romanticism, people started to add subjective value to the picture again, stating that reason is not everything. This led to many different developments.
It became clear that we have subjective knowing, along with objective truths. And if we look at things like beauty, whether I find something beautiful or not is true, but does not constitute an objective truth about the object per se. We might call this a subjective truth.
This insight and the criteria to distinguish objective from subjective knowing are crucial to our maturing as humanity. It points to the individuality and commonality of a human being.
Throwing out postmodernity in its entirety would mean letting go of the concept of subjective truth. But it is essential to keep a moderate version of subjective truth.
The same can be said about psychology, psychiatry, and many more developments of postmodernity. Eat the grapes and spit out the seeds.
Do the same with capitalism as the manifestation of modernity. Then integrate them into a new worldview that transcends modernity and postmodernity.
Spiral Dynamics has proven to be a valuable tool to analyze, heal, integrate, and transcend long-held beliefs and worldviews. I would love to help you. Why not get some coaching?
There has not been stagnation since then, and I certainly could only get back into the field with a significant effort.
Today, we have several things that made the emergence of large language models and other versions of AI possible, not least the availability of a large body of text to train them on.
I remember when cohorts of students formulated rules for rule-based knowledge systems, and now, AI teaches itself on readily available data.
Right behind it, embodied AI in the form of robots is only lagging due to the challenge’s higher complexity.
But what does that mean?
A lot of work that humans do can be done with AI. The range is impressive.
Do you need a complicated contract from a lawyer? The bylaws for a church? A press release for a new product? Ways to fold certain amino acids? An algorithm to calculate something? A deep fake video? A translation of your book into German? Who do you call? Human work busters, formerly called AI.
But what does that mean?
Capitalism is the predominant worldview in the West that captured the whole world. It consists basically of two forces or primary resources: capital and labor.
Erich Weinstein points out that this motivational program gives people some meaning and a reason to get up in the morning without needing a dictator. We exchange capital for our labor.
Capital is motivated to pay for labor in return for gain. This points to one problem of the model, as it has baked into itself the need for perpetual growth.
It also falls short, as there are costs the model of capitalism externalizes, namely the cost of extraction of natural resources and recycling of products, that make the system unsustainable.
But there is a more imminent threat to the system, as we can still go on for a while if the only problems are the destruction of our habitat due to perpetual growth facilitated by not paying for the consequences.
AI just erased labor from the equation.
We are not quite there yet, but progress in this field is fast and speeding up at rates we cannot imagine.
Soon, human labor will be voluntary and mostly delegated to AI and robots. Even if we cannot delegate all labor, a large cohort of people will be out of their job. And not everybody is an artist or able to work in care.
Capital will no longer depend on human labor to accomplish gain soon.
Erich Weinstein again points to the fact that we should already be in the midst of discussing the next form of economy. I would say, even the next world we are going to build.
Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us that
I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”
Capitalism has two major stories:
I go to work for a living
I send my capital to work for me for a living
Captain Picard has another story.
We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity
This is a steep hill to climb within a short time, and there might be a few intermediary steps and supporting tools necessary on the way.
But we will never leap if we do not start talking about the story and the transition. Maybe, the ideal story we will formulate is different–who wants to believe that Gene Roddenberry discovered the future already?
Kazimierz Dabrowski describes a path for personal development called positive disintegration (TPD). It resembles the change process of Spiral Dynamics (SD) that describes the evolution of consciousness in groups and societies. I will use language along the lines of TPD and SD to describe where we are as humanity.
For a long time, we have been in primary integration. Our instincts and environment have proven we found the right way to live. Just listen to most arguments for capitalism, sounding something like “no other worldview has lifted so many people out of poverty.”
Our children grow up to live in that system. Look at the school system, for example.
The Prussians constructed our school system at a time when they lost their military supremacy. It was consciously set up to produce mindless obedient soldiers.
This is why teaching is from the front, the desks are in line, and there are bells. This is why we divide students according to age and teach them the same stuff using the same methods.
In the US and the UK, and later all over the world, the school system has been used to produce mindless obedient factory workers, people willing and capable of providing labor to capital.
What now, that these laborers soon are not needed any longer? And even are not available any longer?
In the West, there is a shortage of skilled workers. Western countries have drawn from other countries for ages to fill their need for skilled workers and accepted the brain drain in these other countries.
Switzerland recruited doctors and nurses in Germany, and they, in turn, in Poland. A few days ago, Germany announced a program with Brazil to move their young people to Germany and educate them as nurses, hoping they would stay in Germany. Switzerland is looking to Africa for supply.
This would be funny if it were not such a terrible thing to do. I am not using the word lightly, but could this be a new form of colonialism? Draining other countries of human resources this time, only to sustain the unsustainable?
But even more than that, the lack of skilled workers, while real, is only temporary at best and conceals the more profound development we talk about here.
Back to what is happening.
We, as humanity, have seen behind the curtain and dismantled the Wizard of Oz. At least some of us have. We have reached level II, the place where we are uncomfortable with the status quo and look for qualitatively similar solutions we can join, and stories we can tell.
We came up with the postmodern worldview, deconstructing everything. But since postmodernity does not offer a path to construct a new worldview but focuses on the tearing down of the old, we hit a wall.
Here is what Martin Gurri says about this in his piece for unherd:
Identity is the ruling orthodoxy of the day. Wesley Yang calls it the “successor ideology”, but it is less an ideology than a cockpit of grinding, wounding grievances contradicting one another: a perpetual conflict machine. Any piece of it, such as racial justice, can make perfect sense, but the whole dissolves into incoherence when it becomes clear that the highest ideal, equity, is a weasel word used to mask an inability to reconcile opposites.
I refer you to the article to undergird the hypothesis of the last sentence.
Let me say it in another way:
Postmodernity tells us, again and again, in time and out of time, in fear-driven urgency, what is wrong with the old system, and mostly does not provide a consistent outlook on how to proceed.
When we are most gracious, we can see parts of postmodernity as humanity’s attempt to stumble towards an ideal it only sees in part and perceives as through a glass dimly. This corresponds with level III in TPD: there is a qualitatively better solution, but we still need to figure out how to get there.
Postmodernity provides insights and tools to eliminate limiting beliefs that have kept us from growing in the previous systems. The challenge we face is distinguishing the forward-pointing useful parts of postmodernism from the destructive and distracting parts. Plus, we have to abstract postmodernity from its unhealthy manifestation we see around us.
The next level in TPD adds direction to our search and growth into our ideal. On a societal level, we might not talk about an ideal, which would sound like a utopia, but a worldview that better fits the challenges we face, brought forth not least by the shortcomings, errors, great inventions and progress of the previous worldview.
It will take a lot of work to reach a new stable state called secondary integration by growing into this new worldview as a society.
Jonathan Rowson from Perspectiva says, “we are living in a time between worlds.”
The next step is to design, discover, and co-create the ideal, to formulate and tell the story of the next world.
I would love to do my part in this endeavor as a coach and accompagnateur.
It may be necessary to remind readers of articles about change that people hate change. Change is a big challenge. But why is that?
To understand, we need to look at our brains. Our brains are bicameral, with a clear cut in the middle. The two halves look different, as if they had been twisted. The right side emphasizes the frontal lobe, while the left has a more extensive posterior area. There are connections, but they inhibit rather than promote communication between the hemispheres.
Iain McGilchrist has revived the study of brain lateralization after previous attempts were dismissed as pop culture. It is not an analytical and a creative half.
Instead, the two hemispheres host something akin to two separate awarenesses that we experience as one. This can be seen in birds. Birds use their right eye, connected to their left brain, to distinguish food from pebbles, while their left eye, and therefore the right brain, is on the outlook for friend or foe. Without the first awareness, the bird would starve; without the second, it would become prey.
Similar observations can be made with humans, as Iain McGilchrist beautifully points out in his two seminal works, “The Master and His Emissary” and “The Matter with Things.” Considering the size of these books, it may become apparent that I need help to prove what I am about to say in an article. I must stand on the shoulders of giants.
With humans, the two awarenesses are “mapping the world to navigate and manipulate it” in the left hemisphere and “seeing the bigger picture and bringing order to chaos and the unknown” in the right hemisphere.
Of course, most of what we do involves both hemispheres, but these two tasks are lateralized.
People can overemphasize the left hemisphere and become rigid, detail-oriented, utilitarian, and closed or arrested in their thinking. It is as it is. Never change a working system, a winning team. We have always done things that way. The left hemisphere does not know what it does not know.
The right hemisphere is different. It knows it needs the left to make sense of its intuition, imagination, unconscious reasoning, the big picture, and the unknown.
The right brain knows it depends on the left because language synthesis can only be done in the left hemisphere. We struggle to express novel thoughts because we lack the vocabulary within our left-brain world model.
The right passes its thoughts to the left for examination against the world model and expects the enriched interpretation back for further analysis and rumination.
In left-brain-dominated societies, that will only sometimes happen because the left hemisphere acts immediately according to its model. It is convinced that it knows what it is doing.
We are currently living in a left-brain-dominated society. We can see it in the tribalization of social media and the political landscape. Everybody knows exactly what to do according to their worldview.
So what is change in this model?
Small changes can be made within the current configuration of the brain. If that were not possible, we would not learn and complete these minor adjustments to the map we have in our left hemisphere to navigate and manipulate the world more successfully.
Things get interesting when we experience significant changes. But what is a big change?
There are moments in our lives when the big picture we feel and intuit with our right hemisphere is no longer congruent with our representation of the outside world in our left hemisphere. Dabrowski would have called this a “psychoneurotic conflict”. This dissonance causes great stress.
There may be several reasons for these divergent interpretations. One could be the emergence of challenges we cannot solve with our familiar left hemisphere sensory tools. Another could be an ideal we want to achieve but must figure out how. The first is a significant change in the second factor, while the latter looks like a journey through the levels of TPD, especially level III, spontaneous multilevel disintegration.
How do we respond to such dissonance? We need to change the world map we use radically. There are two main strategies for doing this. Both strategies can deal with radical environmental change, but it prefers one. An emerging self-authored ideal allows only the other strategy.
What are these strategies?
We adopt the worldview of our environment.
We engage in a dialogue between the two hemispheres and gradually replace the left hemisphere’s map with the newly discovered map that results from this collaboration.
We have all used the first strategy many times in our lives. Think of puberty. It was hard, and you would never have admitted it, but you shed the childlike worldview that served you well in the previous stage of development and replaced it with the dominant worldview of your environment.
The second strategy is much less common. No one models the ideal for you. All you may get is company and tools. This is positive disintegration.
How do these strategies compare?
We now know the differences between the strategies, with one being externally motivated and the other self-created. But how are they similar?
First, let’s describe the Spiral Dynamics model of change as a model that describes change in general.
Spiral Dynamics calls a worldview a value meme because values are at the core of our sense-making, and memes are copied and can go viral. A value meme is a hierarchy of values that others can adopt. Even the name points to the first strategy, where we copy the worldview of others and make it our own. The result also reminds us of primary integration described in TPD: a worldview caused by nature and nurture.
Spiral Dynamics Change Model by ValueMatch
So how does this change process work according to the model?
First, we are in a value meme and feel very comfortable. Let’s call it α.
But after some time, there are the first showers of rain. Certain things are wrong now. It’s not so comfortable anymore. We call this state β. Minor adjustments or simple ignorance help to get back to α.
However, the storms become more significant at some point, and we cannot return quickly. γ is reached. But it’s not all forward, either. The old patterns of thinking and the misconceptions about the future block our way like a wall.
Now we have two options: we reject the new and fall back into patterns we have long since left behind: regression. We seek protection in value memes that we once found valuable. The world was okay then.
Or we break through the wall to the new: revolution.
After the breakthrough, we focus on the new value meme. We call this phase δ. It leads to a new α and thus to new stability.
There is a shortcut to change called flex. It leads directly from β to the new α without blockages, revolutions and the danger of a crash.
Can we force the change process on others? Or at least help it?
No, but we can create living conditions that help them start the process.
This process also describes small changes that do not create a new value meme. Flex is usually only possible in small changes that do not lead to new worldviews.
Here is a summary:
Change state
Description
TPD
Alpha (α) – order
Healthy dynamic tension to the prevailing living conditions
Primary integration
Beta (β) – doubts about the old
First, we try to do more of the usual. This reinforces the anxious beta phase.
Unilevel disintegration
Gamma (γ) – Chaos
Either we find the way out through a possibility of reform, or we are trapped.
Delta (δ) – Recovery toward the new system
But beware: just because I got rid of what was old does not mean I have grasped what is new.
Spontaneous and directed multilevel disintegration
Alpha (α) – consolidation in a new phase of healthy dynamic tension
The world is fine.
Secondary integration
Flex – the abbreviation
From β to the new α for those willing to change. If we look at the different stages in this model, they resemble the stages of TPD. They can be assigned as follows: α Primary Integration, β Stage II, δ Stages III and IV, and α Secondary Integration. γ represents the breakthrough from Stage II to Stage III.
This led me to realize that positive disintegration is a particular case of change that uses the second strategy because it is intrinsically motivated.
What it takes to change
The theory of positive disintegration also explains the prerequisites for a journey through the levels, emphasizing the breakthrough from Level II to Level III. These make the significant difference between the two strategies for change. These prerequisites constitute a strong developmental potential.
A high developmental potential consists of the five overexcitabilities, special talents and abilities, and a high IQ.
These overexcitabilities (OE) are characterized by a small stimulus that triggers an above-average response, a firework. These are:
Intellectual OE: the extreme urge for understanding, knowledge, and truth.
Imaginative OE: strong associations and metaphors, fantasy, (lucid) dreams, and visions.
Sensory OE: intense experience of the stimuli of the five senses up to sensory overload.
Psychomotor OE: enormous energy, urge to move.
Recent research includes Existential or Spiritual OE: spontaneous meditation, extraordinary intuition, spiritual experiences, perceiving the world as one, ‘peak experiences,’ feeling all-encompassing vibrating energy, connection with nature, people, and everything around you, wisdom, compassion, and grace.
OE is about intensity, not complexity. Thus, the intellectual OE is the urge for knowledge, but not intelligence per se, as measured by IQ.
In particular, the first three OEs (intellectual, imaginative, and emotional) strongly support the third factor.
I would include the multiple intelligences, or rather complexities, that have since been discovered and subsume them under “special talents.” Some examples are intellectual (IQ), creative, emotional, sensual, physical, and existential intelligence. Can you see the parallels to the OEs?
If these are the requirements for the particular case of positive disintegration, what are the criteria for worldview change in general? There are six.
Potential: open, blocked, closed – Openness refers to the willingness to take a new path of being. Being blocked is where I want to be open but shy away from the risks of what effects openness might have. In both states, openness and being blocked include the possibility of engaging with a new meme. The closed state has no such option and refuses change. We have learned that a closed state corresponds to left-brain dominance.
We can be in different states in different areas of our lives. We can be open at work, blocked in the family, and closed in faith. (We can also be in various value memes in different areas: professionally modern, tribal in family life, and religiously traditional).
This has nothing to do with an open or closed mindset. Open and closed mindsets are fundamental states of mind and do not depend on life domain and memes.
All problems of the current Value Meme have been solved. — If there are still open problems that can only be solved with the tools of the current meme, it is impossible to go further. Have I learned the great lessons this value meme has in store?
Dissonance — New problems cannot be solved with the current tools.
For example, the traditional tools of the church are no longer sufficient to meet the needs of people in modernity or postmodernity.
Understanding the causes of dissonance — What causes dissonance, and what new tools are needed to solve them? I need to know these new tools or at least have a qualified idea.
Remove obstacles — Obstacles that stand in the way of the new value meme must be identified, bypassed, eliminated, neutralized, or transformed.
Confusion — A transition to a new value meme will bring a period of chaos that must be endured and traversed.
And the application?
Are you experiencing dissonance? What can you do now?
It helps me to know what is going on. That is why I wrote this article, which may only be for some. But it tells me that what I am experiencing is normal, well understood, and has little to do with going nuts or being crazy. In most cases. Even if it feels that way.
A quick aside on this. Even specialists and professionals may misunderstand your challenge. Psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists usually find it their job to bring people from the second level back into primary integration.
But back to the good news.
OK, you are experiencing dissonance. This means that you have already met one requirement for change. Now let’s look at this dissonance. What are areas of your life involved?
You can find out by listing the areas. Some examples are your personal situation (physical, emotional), relationships, job, organizations, living environment, and society.
Now ask yourself these questions for each of these areas:
Am I satisfied with my situation? Is it stable and harmonious? \(\alpha\)
If things are not going well, am I working hard to get back on track? \(\beta\)
Do I feel stuck? \(\gamma\)
Am I doing what is necessary and having fun amid the chaos? FLEX
Am I hopeful because I can see the light at the end of the tunnel? \(\delta\)
Has the storm calmed down, and is my life back on track? NEW \(\alpha\)
Once you have done this and identified the areas that need your attention (which are all those that are not in any of the (\alpha) states, but especially those in (\gamma)), ask yourself what is holding you back.
What is causing the dissonance?
Are there any outstanding issues I need to resolve before moving forward?
Is there anything else in my way?
In areas that are in (\beta) state, you might ask yourself if you have the openness to proceed. If not, ask yourself what it will take to get back to the stable state you were in.
Make sure you understand that confusion is typical in times of change. Your hierarchy of values is in turmoil, which makes it hard to make sense of things, which makes it hard to act. But this, too, will pass.
And remember, this is easier to do in a community. The first strategy is only possible with a community because we copy its hierarchy of values and make it our own. The second strategy is used when there is usually no welcoming community, but we can find peers or mentors.
Spirituality, for me, is everything concerned with purpose and meaning. Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning” comes to mind. As today’s still predominant scientific view, materialism explicitly excludes purpose and meaning. This leads to nihilism and existential frustration, and as Victor Frankl has observed in the Nazi concentration camps, death itself. On the other hand, he says, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
When there are rules and taboos that prevent true fellowship, is there a path out of this stifling pseudo-community? In my article, I blend the insights of M. Scott Peck and Kazimierz Dabrowski to navigate through the chaos.
Iain McGilchrist has revived the study of brain lateralization after previous attempts were dismissed as pop culture. It is not an analytical and a creative half.
Instead, the two hemispheres host something akin to two separate awarenesses that we experience as one. This can be seen in birds. Birds use their right eye, connected to their left brain, to distinguish food from pebbles, while their left eye, and therefore the right brain, is on the outlook for friend or foe. Without the first awareness, the bird would starve; without the second, it would become prey.
Similar observations can be made with humans, as Iain McGilchrist beautifully points out in his two seminal works, “The Master and His Emissary” and “The Matter with Things.”
The Unfiltered Thoughts of a Pastor in Exile
a toolbox to deconstruct your faith without losing it
Have you ever wondered if there is more to faith than attending church, obeying and living a certain lifestyle, and even doing good for others?
Have you ever wondered why, in certain aspects, earthly fathers seem to have a higher moral standard than we ascribe to God?
Or have you ever doubted that doubt is a negative thing, that there is only one interpretation of the Bible, and that the Church already possesses all absolute truth?
I have. When I woke from the dull sleepwalk necessary while caring for my son, receiving healing myself and a cancer diagnosis almost simultaneously, the time came for me to ask questions.
I gathered a few tools to help answer those questions.
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