When self is embedded in others, our problem seems to be without. But is within.
• a son’s new wife doesn’t want to visit
• a mother refuses to accept her dementia
• a spouse won’t move with us to Hawaii
The problem is not our Self but its embeddedness.
• a child gets cancer
• a president we revile
• social injustice
• A war against our cousins
our problem is our relationship to Self.
There are 10,000 ways for the essential to be lost in the non-essential. Family systems theory lists primary categories:
• fear of being the outsider
• obsession with changing someone
• becoming someone’s obsession
• preoccupation with those we are estranged from
• or the idea that we are the groups problem
Bowen theory offers a uni-solution.
• Non-anxious presence
With our mind, we can pry the door of embeddedness. We can pry self from time by studying the vastness of systems biology, from primordial differentiated cells to symbiotic sea squirts to simian systems. Our intellect can picture wider systems and glimpse the self hidden in them.
EMBEDDED IN MIND
But the essence is beyond vast conceptual horizons. The refined intellect can map the olfactory system, the pheromones, and the flower, but it cannot smell the Chrysler Imperial rose by thinking about it.
Deeper than embeddedness in family is embeddedness in our own minds.
Our essential Self is beyond the mind.
It pulses, hidden within everything.
Self is unbounded.
When we experience Self as the echo of silence, we know it.
I’m surrounded by a thundering absence of sound,
Pushed around by nothing but emptiness,
Disappearing into “never been so here”.
When the essence is disentangled from the cloak of biology, we break open, beyond fear of dying. We discover a fountain of calm. Mind differentiates from biology. And so, from the worrying citizenry, and our multi-generational story.
De-embedded, we adore them.
De-embedded, we are free together and free apart.
The mind is a river not a rock,
and all rivers sense they are oceans.
Even the smallest stream has an inkling of where it is headed.
The body, still shaken by death, finds its core to be free together, free apart.
Our mind rests on an unbounded foundation, responding to life’s call, but differentiated from it.
This Erik Thompson has been called father, lover, teacher, and fool. I have called him myself.
But he is not myself.
He is a costume I enjoy wearing.
He is a traveler.But he has a friend who stays at home.
In Brazil we have an ocean,
And we Brazilians are that ocean.
When we think of our ocean,
The ocean thinks of itself.
And when we think, “I am that ocean”
It is the ocean thinking.
The human mind which studies the universe springs forth from it.
WHAT IS SPIRITUAL?
A man in Argentina wakes in the morning and says, “the self is not spiritual.” At the same moment, his wife in Sau Paulo lays her head upon her pillow and thinks “the self is so spiritual.” Each may be embedded in the conceptual to precisely the same degree.
What is spirituality? What is family health?
Definitions will vary. I am not fascinated by definitions of spirituality. Experience teaches what is beyond concepts.
Let us refine concepts, explore them, experiment, and test them. But our essential Self is de-embedded from the costume of these concepts.
Where the bridge to concepts ends, non-anxious presence answers the questions.
Erik,
Nice work to connect your idea about the spiritual and differentiation of self, one of the clearest ways you have said it. That is the conceptual success of your article. But your writing also exists on another level, the level of lived experience of the ocean. As I read, I also experience the ocean! Thank you for your work on this over time. It reveals differentiation in a different way. Your article reminds me of the joy of letting go of the small self, and allowing what you call the Self.
Erik,
You and I are going in exactly opposite directions. You seem to be aiming for taking spirituality away from biology. I am working very hard, with little success, to integrate mind, intuition, imagination with biology. I think they both are good exploratory projects. Wish us both luck.
Jim Edd
I do wish you luck Jim Edd and miss seeing you. What matters most seems so hard to pin down with the tools of science, and I admire the hard work that goes into doing it well. I’m not taking spirituality away from biology, but that is another conversation.