Psychotherapy East & West. Alan Watts
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objects separated from each other, but . . . only the unity of certain functional relations, which are differently designated according to the system of reference in which we express them.27
While we must be careful not to overstress analogies between physics and human behavior, there must certainly be general principles in common between them. Compare what Cassirer said with Gardner Murphy:
I have believed for a long time that human nature is a reciprocity of what is inside the skin and what is outside; that it is definitely not “rolled up inside us” but our way of being one with our fellows and our world. I call this field theory.28
The ways of liberation are of course concerned with making this so-called mystical consciousness the normal everyday consciousness. But I am more and more persuaded that what happens in their disciplines, regardless of the language in which it is described, is nothing either supernatural or metaphysical in the usual sense. It has nothing to do with a perception of something else than the physical world. On the contrary, it is the clear perception of this world as a field, a perception which is not just theoretical but which is also felt as clearly as we feel, say, that “I” am a thinker behind and apart from my thoughts, or that the stars are absolutely separate from space and from each other. In this view the differences of the world are not isolated objects encountering one another in conflict, but expressions of polarity. Opposites and differences have something between them, like the two faces of a coin; they do not meet as total strangers. When this relativity of things is seen very strongly, its appropriate affect is love rather than hate or fear.
Surely this is the way of seeing things that is required for effective psychotherapy. Disturbed individuals are, as it were, points in the social field where contradictions in the field break out. It will not do at all to confirm the contradictions from which they are suffering, for the psychiatrist to be the official representative of a sick system of institutions. The society of men with men and the larger ecological society of men with nature, however explicitly a contest, is implicitly a field — an agreement, a relativity, a game. The rules of the game are conventions, which again mean agreements. It is fine for us to agree that we are different from each other, provided we do not ignore the fact that we agreed to differ. We did not differ to agree, to create society by deliberate contract between originally independent parties. Furthermore, even if there is to be a battle, there must be a field of battle; when the contestants really notice this they will have a war dance instead of a war.
* In his superb essay “Human Law and the Laws of Nature,” in Vol. 2 of Science and Civilization in China, Joseph Needham has shown that, largely because of Taoist influence, Chinese thought has never confused the order of nature with the order of law. As a way of liberation Taoism, of course, brings to light the manner in which men project their social institutions upon the structure of the universe.
* This is perhaps comparable to a shift in the level of magnification so as to observe the individual members of a colony of microorganisms instead of its overall behavior.
* I, for example, as an “independent philosopher” could not possibly be saying what I am if I were really independent. “My” ideas are inseparable from what Northrop Frye calls “the order of words,” i.e., the total pattern of literature and discourse now being unfolded throughout the world.
* I find it, likewise, difficult to read the stories of the Last Supper without getting the impression that Jesus commanded Judas to betray him.
* Mead himself does not use the term “ego” in quite this sense, for he associates it with the “I” rather than with the “me.” But since he is also associating the “I” with the organism, this seems quite inconsistent, for the ego is almost invariably considered as something in the organism, like the chauffeur in a car, or a little man inside the head who thinks thoughts and sees sights. It is just this ego feeling that is the social construct.
* While he has assembled a good deal of evidence in support of this suggestion, he does not claim to have proved it. Other research is suggesting that schizophrenia may be explained chemically as a toxic condition, but the two points of view do not necessarily exclude each other. The stress induced by the double-bind situation could have something to do with generating the toxin.
* As when a mother requires her child to love her and yet withdraws from expressions of affection.
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