by Alan Briskin | Collective Folly, Collective Wisdom, Conscious Capitalism, Politics, Spirituality
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Fifteen
Moving from Factions to the Whole:
Paying Attention in New Ways
Part 1: Psycho-Spiritual Perspectives
Time Range: 1787-1789, Current Times
FLASH POINTS
“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”
— James Madison, Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
“I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men … where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789 (source)
The Founding Fathers of the United States, like Madison and Jefferson, were deeply concerned with the tendency of groups to congeal into political factions and dictate solutions from their own factional viewpoint. With only a touch of irony, Jefferson’s statement, that he would decline an invitation to heaven if it meant going with a political party, should give us pause as we look out on our current landscape of political activity. However, it was not conflict they were avoiding, nor were they looking for simple forms of compromise among multiple distorted views. They were, in an uncompromising fashion, looking for productive angles by which the union could be preserved and intelligence awakened in the collective body. They were seeking to unravel a paradoxical riddle: How could creation of a central government be complementary with individual moral agency?
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”
We have never resolved that riddle, but a key element for these Founders was education of a kind in which individuals grew in their capacity for values such as personal reflection, respectful debate, and shared understanding. Similarly, in the research that led to our book, The Power of Collective Wisdom: And the Trap of Collective Folly, we discovered similar values and approaches that created the conditions for collective wisdom to arise. We called these ways of knowing psychological stances indicating attitudes and commitments that fostered reflective consciousness and discernment. Some of these stances included deep listening, suspending personal certainty, seeking diverse perspectives, and welcoming the unexpected.
Beyond any single stance, however, was encouragement to be curious, to ask questions, and to trust in the wisdom of the body, both personal and collective. We also pointed out that collective wisdom’s opposing tendency was false dualities created by forced agreements within a group or extreme polarization between groups. In other words, the same kinds of extreme factions that many of the Founding Fathers were so alarmed about and that still exist today.
Why? What is it about factions that creates such jeopardy for the collective body? Conversely, what is it about wholeness and viewing ourselves as part of a collective body that is so valuable? I offer three overlapping perspectives—psycho-spiritual, physiological, and social—that may shed light on these questions.
Psycho-spiritual perspective.
By their nature, factions, separated from the concerns of the whole, take on radical self-interest. This self-interest is inherently a reductionist view of a larger reality. Psychologically, the limited perspective is captured in the mind for easy retrieval by a symbol, phrase, or fantasized ideal state. Over time, the symbol or ideal gains greater and greater power, further reducing the legitimacy of other viewpoints and limiting consideration of the complexity and ambiguity of actual circumstances. In other words, an obsession of sorts is constellated in the mind and in the group. This thought form, once constructed, can be highly contagious in groups because it offers structure and a reduction of complexity. Law and order is a perfect example of this kind of reductionist label, but so are ideas like liberty, freedom, and even human rights. These concepts all begin with some original meaning or orientation but devolve rapidly into factional interpretations.
If we are to truly consider what it means to move toward wholeness, we must grasp the psychological and spiritual nature of possession. Ideas can take us over, literally. Although our heads may not spin around on our shoulders like in the movie The Exorcist, the effect is somewhat similar when debating each other. We would rather die than give up on our opinion. Rather than dialogue moving us toward something in common, we only exacerbate the polarities among us. Idealized thought patterns become obsessive, mental activity becomes agitated under the cloak of reason, and reason becomes a tool to prove that one is right. Superficial compromise only covers over the rigidity and single-mindedness of the possession.
The neuroscientist Robert Burton calls it the feeling of knowing and wonders if we are creating a reward system for the brain that values being correct and feeling certain over “acquiring a thoughtful awareness of ambiguities, inconsistencies, and underlying paradoxes” (Robert Burton, M.D., On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not).
The sobering news about factions is that moving toward wholeness cannot be accomplished through good intention, reason, or compromise—at least not initially. There are times when in polarized situations we must confront the limitations of the other point of view and address directly the potential or reality of dangerous consequences. This takes courage.
Conflict-resolution strategies, as valuable as they are, should not be mistaken for trying to find a false middle ground or become justification for avoiding conflict. Some degree of polarization and conflict is needed to flush out underlying causes, especially the strong psychological forces that underlie genuine conflict. By engaging consciously with the dualities that possess us, we use the very tension of the opposites to bring forth new awareness. We should not imagine, however, that engaging the conflict is the same as convincing the other side that they are wrong or winning them over to our solutions. This is not about personal confrontation or victory in debate. The spiritual focus is very clear in this regard. Resolving conflict cannot be about individual ego. Rather, we are seeking to bring forward a memory of wholeness, a memory that already exists in each of us.
The way to transcend the possessions that claim us is to engage the imagination and the heart as well as the mind. We are seeking to notice more, to arouse a yearning within us to move from a lesser perspective to a greater one. This is altogether different than simply selecting positions or choosing sides. How we do this is unique to each situation. In some cases, it may be through humor or through the innocence of a genuine question or by reminding others of the human consequences of certain actions. It may be by bringing forward the true complexity of a situation or the moral ambiguity of almost any charged circumstance. It may be by standing firm. It is often by listening and demonstrating to the other side that they are being heard.
However it is accomplished, the hope is that reason and moral agency can be awakened in both the individual and the collective group. We may not be able to sway those most strongly identified with a factional viewpoint, but the appeal is to the larger whole.
The call to something greater can be understood as a spiritual mandate, change necessary to bring balance to a human system gone awry. I use “spiritual” here to express the best of the human spirit, qualities such as kindness, intelligence, compassion, discernment, and justice. These qualities arise from a regard for wholeness, linked linguistically with the words healing and holy through the Old English word haelan. The movement from faction to whole is a journey of healing, reawakening what is best in us and putting a salve on old wounds.
Many years ago, in a personal correspondence, Peter Vaill, the pioneering theorist on organizational change, wrote to me about the relationship between spirit and large-scale change: “Several years ago when I was first trying to think systematically about spirituality, I realized that spiritual ideas hold promise for healing some of the deep divisions among people; and conversely, if we try to heal deep divisions while leaving soul and spirit out of this process, we will probably fail. Any agreement will be temporary and expedient only.” In Peter’s words, we see again that change is not solely on the outside or inside, but at the intersection of the two.
A spiritual mandate for change is not a new form of obsession, though it could be, but rather a re-acquaintance with our inherent connectedness with others. Sometimes this can create discomfort or even heighten differences, but as Martin Luther King demonstrated regarding civil rights or Mahatma Gandhi showed us when fighting for India’s independence, the spiritual context is not about the domination of others. It is about creating the conditions for our interconnectedness to be revealed and our old wounds healed. To do this requires not only intellectual insight or even emotional warmth, but the wisdom of the body.
NEXT WEEK: Moving from Factions to the Whole, PART II
The movement from factions to wholeness includes the wisdom of the body. It may seem a leap, but being aware of our body is a direct experience of the movement from part to whole. By attending to breath, we slow down and cultivate presence. By being aware of our physical body, we bring into consciousness the wisdom of the throat, heart, and gut. The body does not lie.
by Alan Briskin | Conscious Capitalism, Consciousness, Spirituality
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Fourteen
Moving from Duality to Wisdom
Part Two: The Triadic Mind of Kabbalah
Time Range: Future Times
I find it to be one of the great paradoxes of creative thought that only by wiping the mind clean of categories and assumptions can we think clearly and in new ways. Yet, it makes perfect sense if it is our habitual thought that keeps us trapped. In the physical brain, there is a very real neurocognitive architecture that keeps us confined to certain ways of thinking. At the collective level, there are social fields that influence individual thought and action. All the categories we have discussed directly or indirectly—privilege, poverty, protest, rebellion, anguish, revenge, reform—all have had thousands of years to imprint themselves on the human collective through repetitive patterns. These patterns have within them predicable associations and moral judgments, good or bad, just or unjust, moral or immoral. The mind seeks to find new solutions but often simply re-creates the old patterns in new ways.
Some today are asking if there is larger purpose behind these patterns or a meaning we should glean. Is it all part of a greater evolutionary destiny moving us toward divinity? Or, are these patterns the breadcrumbs leading to species annihilation? Let us for the moment answer mu.
In the movement away from duality, what the wisdom traditions offer are enhanced cognitive and emotional tools. Provocatively, I believe that wisdom traditions, properly understood, cast grave doubt on the propositions that answers can all be found inside ourselves and, conversely, that solely by altering social institutions can we achieve a more stable society. We must, as Einstein prophetically proposed, find answers from a state of consciousness different from the one in which the problem was created. Let us return to the Kabbalist structure of the triadic mind to see what elements are crucial to continually move from duality to noticing something new.
The first element, Binah, is a hungering for the logic of a given situation. Sometimes compared to the methodical skills of the brain’s left hemisphere, the emphasis with Binah is on analytic understanding. The analytic way of understanding is the home of the scientist but also anyone who uses logic and quantitative analysis to gather, analyze, and build hypotheses based on data and observable information. But the true power of this mode of thinking is its capacity for coherence, the ability to show how facts hang together in regard to the questions that are being asked. This process requires imagination but operates within strict parameters.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
The legendary physicist Richard Feynman offers a good description of the quality of this way of thinking. To make his point, he contrasts the analytic form of mental activity with that of fiction writers.
But the scientist’s imagination always is different from a writer’s in that it is checked. A scientist imagines something and then God says “incorrect” or “so far so good.” God is experiment, of course, and God might say, “Oh no, that doesn’t agree.” You say, “I imagine it works this way. And if it does, then you should see this.” Then other guys look and they don’t see it. That’s too bad. You guessed wrong. You don’t have that in writing. (Mlodinow, L, Feynman’s Rainbow)
Along with analysis, we need something further to extend beyond duality. The second aspect of mind that Kabbalists describe is Chokhmah, or wisdom. Here we have something closer to the power of intuitive insight, flash understandings, even revelations. It is why the composer Tchaikovsky can say, “The germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soil is ready …” Chokhmah is the constant preparation of the soil through study, observation, playfulness, flow—the deepening presence of a mind capable of emergence. Wisdom of this kind is aware of subtle shifts in interior awareness as well as shifts in the external circumstances of a group or larger collective.
Wisdom of this nature has the capacity of transcending conventional categories and the power of linking the world as it is with how the world might be. This is the kind of wisdom that led Mahatma Gandhi to read Henry David Thoreau’s account of personal civil disobedience and see in it a larger collective form of protest tied to universal principles of justice and truth. If Binah seeks the logic of how something is put together, Chokhmah asks to what end? Why should we put effort into something if not to create something that has a larger more universal truth.
So far so good. A mind capable of creating coherence from logic and the agility to leap categories in a single bound is a formidable instrument but still incomplete. In the triadic tradition of mind formulated by Kabbalists, a third thing is necessary to ground and complement both logic and intuition. This third thing is knowledge, or Da’at. This is the willingness to engage in study, to continually gather information, and to adjust one’s thinking in alignment with new information. We become less capable of remaining in duality if all three forms of intelligences are activated.
But the Kabbalists took it one step further. They understood the mind as an infinitely elusive channel seeking wonder, awe, and beauty but capable of being caught in its own web of individual mental thought. The triadic mind required something more, a secret sauce, also associated with Da’at. This secret sauce was reflective consciousness, a joining together of multiple layers of awareness equated metaphorically with sexual union.
The great Kabbalist Reb Zalman Schachter Shalomi compares this form of reflective intelligence to the brain’s cerebellum, which acts as a switchboard for our attention. What is worthy of our attention? What do we consider important or irrelevant? Do we pay greater attention to threat or opportunity? What about our memory? Do we selectively choose bits and pieces of our past, or do we work at retaining wholeness? What is the nature of our attention? Is it disciplined or jumping from thing to thing? Is our attention primarily self-referential or about others? What ultimately do we pay attention to, and what is the quality of that attention?
To move beyond dualism is to be capable of slipping the chains of having to be aligned with one thing or another. Reflective consciousness simultaneously is a deepening of one’s own presence.
I am reminded of a dialogue I facilitated with Deepak Chopra and three wonderful Japanese thought leaders: a filmmaker, a philosophy professor, and a spiritual leader. The philosophy professor, as best as I could understand through translation, was describing with rigor the question of whether the ego actually exists. I was finding myself exhausted following the subtle points he was making about ego and its illusory nature. Deepak listened with great patience, and after the man finished, he simply said, “There is no greater drama for the ego than to debate its own existence.”
Immediately, I could feel my body relax and the crease in my brow ease. I had been caught in the duality of the question, and my attention had become entirely analytic. Does the ego exist or not? Come on now, follow the argument! But the moment Deepak spoke about the ego’s excitement about debating its own existence, I was brought back to my reflective consciousness. I became aware that my thoughts about ego had taken on separateness. Deepak’s comment brought me back into my body and with that my intuitive intelligence. Suddenly, there appeared a great deal of subtle humor—the ego debating with itself about its existence. This could be theater, an interior version of Waiting for Godot, becoming more and more ludicrous by the minute. Now, everything shifted and I came closer to mu and ayin, the obliteration of dualistic form and the opening to new creative formulations. I could pay attention in a new way.
Next Week: Chapter Fifteen, Part One: Moving from Factions to the Whole
“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”
~ James Madison, Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
