Review of "Trances People Live: Healing Approaches in Quantum Psychology"

According to Dr. Stephen Wolinsky’s book Trances People Live, you are in a trance right now. How do I know this? Because your attention is focused on the text as you are reading this. You are internalizing the symbols of these words and converting them to sound in order to understand what I am trying to convey. For the most part you are likely wholly unconcerned with the ambient sounds or space around you, and while this “absorption of knowledge” trance could be broken by, say, a loud sound it would not necessarily make you trance free, but instead send you into a “be on the alert” trance. While this example makes trances appear innocuous, at a more fundamental level they play a powerful role in our daily lives and are primary determinants as to whether or not we experience the sensory world in a present or hallucinatory manner.

Trance states are the patterns of thinking which hold us together in the present moment. They are not necessarily singular and topical, as in the above illustration, but are also amalgamations of strongly held values clustered under the general header of Deep Trance Phenomenon. These are the associations and responses that we literally embody, that is to say somatically, on a daily basis which we consider to be “us”. At one level “I” am the experience of these various clusters in a world that subverts, is neutral to and assists the manifestation of said trances. From another vantage point, the “I” is a completely fictional construct able to be manipulated to a new form by our will if we so desire. The problem is, however, that quite often our responses to large or small traumatic events are so ingrained or occur within conscious evaluation that we forget the resources we once knew and become stuck in patterns that inhibit our maximal agency. Put another way, our psychosomatic symptoms are caused by the non-utilization of unconscious resources. When something is overwhelming us, affecting us in a way that is purportedly beyond our control it is because we are preventing our deeper knowledge of the self from surfacing and steering our consciousness.

Using hypnosis to interrupt, shift or alter these Deep Trance Phenomenon allows the practitioner to both access these resources and circumvent the content issues that in other forms of talk therapy. This form of de-symptomization is called brief therapy and was pioneered by, amongst others, Milton Erickson who Wolinsky openly models himself upon and theoretically adapts. Avoiding the stories that are falsely perceived as causative of the symptoms may seem counter-intuitive, but upon a closer examination it becomes more apparent why this is preferable at times.

Instead of spending an extended period of time locating traumatic moments the precede and inform that maladaptive psychosomatic symptoms which first brought the client there, as Wolinsky demonstrates that such a narrative is only related to the patient’s present circumstances as firmly as they desire it to be, it’s better to simply shake up those help the patient realize their authorship and control of the situation through various practices of creating context. Once we have come to recognize that we are more than or larger than the source of distress with which we most often identify our entire experience of life shifts. This is not to say that such derivational searches into one’s past are wholly specious – just that we should not fetishize the Freudian talk-therapy model that would have us spend countless hours rehashing details of traumatic events that we’d like to move beyond. Additionally worth mentioning is how Wolinsky repeatedly states that if regression work is done it’s of the utmost importance to have the client acknowledge that the response to a traumatic situation was the best possible choice at the time. But now that time has passed and conditions are no longer the same, he argues, it’s imperative to shift it to a state of greater presence so that a more appropriate perspective can be embodied.

Dr. Wolinsky then proceeds to delineate the qualities of various trance states that cause detrimental effects on the psyche. Based upon the entrenched patterns of the states he places them within an oppositional dichotomy so that therapists can process them via negation. Doing this helps patients realize their control over their internal dialogue and psychosomatic symptoms. As the list is not long I will include it here so that the reader can get a hint at some of the specific Deep Trance Phenomenon that lead to unnecessary anxiety and stress: The opposite of age regression is a pseudo-orientation in time; the opposite of hypermnesia is amnesia; the opposite of sensory distorition is analgesia; the opposite of over-identification is dissociation or hypnotic dreaming; the opposite of positive hallucination is negative hallucinations. Unfortunately the descriptions of these are and I doubt anyone will be able to read it and not be able to recall their having been trapped by one of these perspectives. Another aspects of this section that I found personally moving was reading Dr. Wolinsky’s narrative of how he had come to embody the state of hypermnesia as I had similar early life conditions which lead me to the same vigilant trance state.

This particular book has been one of my favorites amongst the assigned FICAM reading and I look forward to reading more of Dr. Wolinsky’s work. Not only is his exegesis of concepts clear and the contextualization of his use of them insightful, but the processes he outlines for working with patients based upon his experience makes the knowledge the book provides eminently operable.

Talking About Self-Generation: Reframing Self-Talk to Increase Autopoiesis

In the Mishlei the author of Proverbs states: “As a man thinketh, so is he.” This sentiment is also found across many other world religions, is a basic presupposition of psychoanalysis and is being verified by research in the neurosciences. Indeed, how we use language, logos, to understand ourselves, others and the world helps create the parameters for how we define ourselves. History sets an additional set of limits, often out of our direct control, however from the vantage point of the self, the individual has incredible, almost magical power – for logos is not just words but an entire way of perceiving oneself within the world.

Too often our self-identifications and familial or culturally inherited assumptions can result in the creation of behavioral symptoms that, while recognized and seen as inhibitive to our heart-felt desires, seem outside of our control. In such contexts, people will refuse their own agency in the causal chain of such maladaptive behaviors by claiming “That’s just how I am” or “I can’t help it.”, totally unaware that in classical Greek and Roman times, someone might have similarly said that they were possessed by a god or goddess.

In a journal, divide a piece of paper into two with a line and write down some of the aspects of your self that you wish to improve on the left hand side. After spending some time to examine some of the values that you currently hold which play a role in the manifestation of these reaction and habits, write down their opposite. Try to be as general as possible. For example, say you find your happiness and ability to enjoy situations limited by other people’s lack of adherence to your standards of behavior, fashion, or some other aspect. The inverse of this generalized would be to not be judgmental, to simply accept others as they are.

After you have completed this you now have a general outline of the ways in which you can start creating yourself into being a happier, healthier person. However, do not feel the need now to wholly reform/rephrase your self over night. Attempting to do so will overwhelm you and very quickly the past habits, behaviors and internal language will return. Freud called this the repetition compulsion. Instead, pick one and make a commitment to stick with it for a period of time. Doing so not only gives you an easy win, something which should be embraced if one wants to alter habits of thought as from these it’ll be easier to scaffold on larger changes, but as this small change will begin to affect other in ways you can not immediately foresee. As you begin to become comfortable with this, commit yourself to another self-edit. What you will soon begin to notice is that your consciousness will begin to spend less time correcting itself in situations that once caused upset or anxiety and the re-organization of your self-assemblage will result in your feeling increased satisfaction. The journal you keep to write down these transformations, regardless of how banal the outside appearance is, inside will begin to give the impression of a magic tome. After all, with only your intent, a few words and their voicing through your mind and body, you can enact sorcery on your self.

Review of "The Untethered Soul"

Michael Singer’s book The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself is basically old wine in a new skin. It offers up various aspects of Vedic philosophies without the terminology so that this old knowledge on how to live a life liberated from needless suffering can be easily digested and propagated for a new generation. These relatively simple answers on how to live a better life by gaining increased control over your thoughts, releasing the identities that have latched onto you and were mistaken for immutable truths and gives practical advice on how to achieve such freedom. Singer uses metaphors that are often quite compelling and while at times redundant, this does the effect of really driving the material home to the reader.

Singer first encourages us to examine our the manner in which our thoughts and emotions affect the structure of our inner energy. The are in a near constant state of vacillation, moving around from one thing to another depending upon what it is that we decide to lay our attention on at that moment. Some of the effects of this lack of disciplined thinking include fear, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety, and a sense of disconnection from one’s self and one’s environment. By putting faith into the illusion that we can have control over the events of our lives, we become disillusioned with the world.

One of the practices that Singer promotes is the immediate release of any sort of energy caused that may be evoked by other people’s words or actions. Such energy patterns, which might also be called reactive emotional states, which fail to process themselves within and stay rather than flowing through will create inner conflict. An analogy of the denial of it’s flowing through via resistance can be found in the plugging of a dam. The force continues to push, leading to increased stress upon the structure, which will cause it to eventually burst. Instead, after recognizing the energy that is created, one should immediately let it go through and if there are still traces of resistance return to the position of Watcher. Once there these impressions, called Samskara in the Vedic tradition, will dissipate. If we are able to choose and successfully practice staying always open to our experiences then we will, in essence, never be closed off from a limitless source of enthusiasm and high energy. No longer having to maintain the extreme physical and psychic state of judgment and fear of a situation, out happiness, joy and presence increases markedly.

As simple as this practice sounds, the ego has devised many a complex means of avoiding just such a practice. Instead of removing the source of their pain, people will often instead struggle to be the same. They don’t want to change, the just want the discomfort associated with their actions to be nullified. This can become quite a problem as the denial and avoidance of these samskaras will often lead you to use people as, places and things as protective shields from your awareness of this issue. Thus what was claimed to be done in order to avoid certain patterns of thoughts and behavior actually results in one devoting a constant aspect of their life to it. By letting our awareness alight onto something we find disquieting and then simply let it go back to whence it came we find a true freedom. Doing otherwise merely puts a veneer on our consciousness which hides the true inside that’s been made more fetid and abominable due to our false claims that these issues have been genuinely dealt with.

While I’m supportive of a majority of the analysis and proscriptions which Singer lays out in order to obtain increased peace of mind and spiritual wellbeing, I do find his chapter 15 and 16 to be problematic for reasons that I’ve written about in my response to Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. While it is eminently practicable to generally withhold from making judgements based upon preferences lest they upset your internal bearings on an individual level of abstraction and to refrain from resisting certain experiences outside of one’s control, on the societal level I find such a position to be criminally permissive. In quasi-democratic societies that allot for a certain amount of citizen’s input to social, economic and political policy proscriptions, such detachment from the political process disempowers the individual while claiming it to be a “higher” form of spiritual empowerment. A simple rejoinder to such a criticism that could have been pre-empted would have been that one can engage in action designed to fix perceived injustices as long as it does not upset one personally, however this seems to go against the spirit of Singer’s previous exposition that all non-currently existent in the world social relations that are held up as a source for comparison should be ejected from consciousness. Reality to Singer is just something that “is” and we should “Learn to stop resisting reality, and what used to look like stressful problems will begin to look like the stepping stones of your spiritual journey.” I say reality “to Singer” as, like Tolle in A New Earth, the book is seriously lacking any interlocution with materialist considerations and as he ends up conflating the Tao Te Ching, the Christian Bible, Freud, various Buddhist texts and Ramana Maharshi. This misprision of these texts ends up providing a false conception of those work and indeed of “reality”. Despite what Singer wants to convey, reality doesn’t go away because you stop believing in it and even the most cursory examinations of the Tao, the text which he grants the authority to close the book, shows that such the notions of categorical disconnection of individual action from the world is neither implicit or explicit within the text.

Bio-energetically Reterritorializing Psychosomatic Terrain for Optimum Operationality

An astute observer of human interaction will note the small number of authentically creative choices that people make in a typical day. Numerous scientific studies have recently been popularized in books such as The Power of Habit and relate the potentially problematic effects of our behaviorally coasting on automatic.

Habit loops not only inhibit our ability to deal with novel problem-solving needs in the workplace, but can also be deleterious to our inter- and intra- personal relationships as well. Emotional-reaction routines often direct us along well-trod terrain to a destination that, while comfortable due to its familiarity, is potentially not what we actually desire. Repetition compulsion and it’s obverse can lead to what Freud called endopsychic conflict. The reason for this is that formulating a novel response to a new and distinct set of circumstances that would likely better serve us requires reflection and commitment that, in the heat of the moment, can be difficult to consider and hold to. However, failure to adapt and relying instead upon the smoothness of habit can lead to feelings of fear, depression, isolation, anger, generalized anxiety or social discord.

One of the problems in addressing these disempowering habits on a personal level and in relation to other people is resistance to logical interrogation. Intra-personally our inchoate “others” advocating for a different path are often weak and quickly silenced. Inter-personally people often take offense when someone claims that the presuppositions under-girding our response-patterns may be faulty in some manner. Talk therapy seeks to surpass these limits through the transference of aspects of the therapist’s consciousness to the patient, but relying solely upon this dynamic to help engender change significantly limits the possibilities for positive affective adaptation. Another manner for creating the conditions for reterritorializing unwanted and undesired thoughts and behaviors involves something that you already know but have just not considered in the right light – your body.

Studies on the components of human interaction have definitively proven that the body’s placement and gestures compose the majority of any given communication. No wonder than that when you or someone else is literally embodying upset, anger, or depression that it can be difficult to get them to alter their emotional state. And yet to rid oneself of this feeling requires your to simply shift your attention, change your body’s position and engage in energetic cleansing.

To accomplish this, first take a deep breath and bring your attention to the sensation of your lungs filling with air and your feet pressing against the floor. As you continue to breath in and out slowly move your focus upward to your knees, your hips, your heart, your throat, the space just above the center of your eyeballs and then a few feet above your head. Doing this will give you increased control of your energetic state and thus make it more difficult for habit to control you. Chances are after doing this you will feel yourself standing taller and immediately feeling more at peace. The energy you felt before will still be present, but it will no longer have a specific label associated with it and you can thus direct it in a manner more appropriate to maintaining peace. This shift in breath and scanning of your body’s meridians, to use a clichéd phrase, breaks the mold. A fitting turn of phrase considering in many ways that’s precisely what the labels are, affective tropes which limit freedom. Engaging in this practice that shifts your body’s state will allow you to regain it.

Jung's Shadow-Self and You

After every FICAM training weekend my head stirs with new thoughts and concerns as it relates to individual and group psychology. This weekend we focused on the Jungian notion of the “shadow-self,” or the qualities of our personality that we seek to declaim, repress and deny. The tension between this and the better angels of our nature can lead one to feel as if they are torn between two opposing forces. The inability to reconcile this divide can become a barrier to positive self-growth. This occurs when one’s previous history has been reified in a personal narrative that is given a life of it’s own, and usually occurs around signpost moments in our lives.

These qualities coming to have a negative effect on our present-self is ironic, as these aspects of our personality that we conceive of as being negative, contaminated, careless, self-destructive or in other ways detrimental to our living our life in accordance with the image we wish is often materialized from what we conceive of as it’s opposite: positive intentions. For instance the “shadow” can manifest as an increased selfishness or neediness in order to assist one at a time when it’s recognized at some level of the consciousness as necessary to extract oneself from a damaging relationship. Perhaps a feeling of debilitating pain and guilt emerges during an episode of significant loss of something or someone significant. In either case, these coping mechanisms can endure in the unconscious and subsequently impinge on the conscious-self in unwanted ways. In the cases of the two examples I gave this can take the form of a generalize selfishness in relationships or aversion to the give-and-take required of serious romantic relationships or a generalized depression and feelings of worthlessness.

If these aspects of our consciousness are not dealt with properly, such forces can become almost like a possessive spirit. We become trapped in stories, whose lessons don’t now apply and debilitate us. While simply to deny this “shadow self” is attractive and suits well our vanity, for from such a position we are able to claim enlightenment, rationality and superiority for not having that in us, the truth is it is a specious reality that is sometimes insufficient to wrest control from that spirit within us.

Instead, at times we must acknowledge this shadow-self is a recurrent force popping up at various times throughout our lives with various degrees of intensity. Additionally we must learn to accept it, neigh embrace it, as a part of us that is sometimes helpful, but also sometimes hurtful. With greater insight into our own internal motivations, fears, and values, we are able to have greater control over them and thus work to adjust ourselves to our consciously desired state.

In the course of our group work over the weekend myself and other FICAM students drew our shadow-selves to depict our own personal conception of the shadow so that we may encounter it with our rationality, for leaving it solely to the realm of the unconscious is to allow it to express itself through us without our full awareness. Not wanting to be imbalanced, we also drew pictures of our “light-self” so we could face that as well. What followed were a number of neuro-linguistic programming, bioenergetics and formative psychology exercises, as well as traditional talk therapy intervention, using Jung’s work as a foundation. The experiences people had were powerful, encouraging us to move beyond the self-degradation and towards self-empowerment. I greatly enjoyed the weekend and look forward to one day soon being able to share these powerful tools with clients.

Review of "Choice Theory"

Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom is William Glasser’s presentation of a mode for everyday human interaction that doesn’t rely upon coercion and force to compel people to act in a specific manner. Why is this desirable? Glasser holds that these power dynamics and compulsions to act limit the individual, leads to personal disempowerment, dissatisfaction with life and human relationships and an undue focus upon material possession rather than positive, high-quality social interactions. The manner in which Glassner seeks to evade such exertions of power is by promoting personal autonomy and demanding that we reflect deeply upon the choices available to people. By realizing how it is that we often form our own behaviors by choices we make, Glassner holds that we gain power over our emotions and our repertoire of responses – even if we can’t do so over the conditions in which we live. There are many examples given of how this actually works, some more compelling than others, as well as methods for obtaining positive results from a currently bad situation.

This can include avoiding two of the purely negative types of individuals that he cites as well as one of the methods for obtaining peace, contentment and happiness in a permanent relationship. This latter mechanism involves the conscious creation of “circles of belonging”. While the examples primarily relate to marriage, Glasser claims that this also applied to family and even work dynamics. Focusing on this can help counteract people’s choice to depress, exhibit deleterious psychosomatic functions and help build stronger social ties. On the point of generalized therapeutic practices, Glasser writes passionately that it is not that childhood or previous experiences of the patient that truly matters but whatever problematic relationship they are now in. Glasser states that normally he forgoes this typical Freudian tactic to instead analyze the problem and reorient them to proper behavior that recognizes their choice in disfunction. While, nominally, I agree with this, I think it also important for the therapist to provide the client with tools to better understand their former choices in such a manner as they can see how their choices, empowering or disempowering, creative or destructive, helped bring them to that point. Such a tract will of course depend on the desires of the client, but I thought it worth mentioning.

One of the larger sections which Glasser shows his choice theory in action is in his exposition on it’s functionality in public schools both ideally and in case studies. After having had his ideas adopted by a number of principles and even getting involved with them, he shows how the model explicated in Choice Theory in the Classroom works. This section, while interesting, has the same failings as several other points in the book. Simply it makes very broad claims without documentation. This is not to say that there are not some very worthy points to be made. Glasser agrees with Freud’s position that much of the self-repression which occurs isn’t, qua repression, bad – for if one was to unleash the many aggressive feelings one has when one’s desires are delayed or negated the world would be much more violent. However Glasser does claim that the world’s level of violence is increasing, a point that Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined refutes as well as current statistics on gun and knife violence. I point this out only as I find the foray of psychologists into social science to be understandable but also specious at times, for as in this case not only does the actual evidence go against him but it’s not needed for his argument that Choice Theory is a practice that should reach a wider audience. Another point that I find somewhat disconcerting is the author’s apparent claim that he has developed choice theory himself, without the influence of other theories, when much of the components of it were outlined by the Greek stoics thousands of years ago. While he did adapt aspects of it to fit modern needs and devise therapeutic approaches to it, I find this silent disavowal problematic.

One of the traits of this and several other of the FICAM readings that I’ve been doing that I look forward to writing on in the future is that manner in which many of these psychological texts posit that the application of the paradigm propounded within the books is claimed to create an ideal living situation for all in contradistinction to the terrible world administered by government. Additionally this type of power is claimed as pre-eminent by its exponents and in a way it becomes a force for universalist, humanist personal power. Those familiar with Foucault’s writing on psychology and biopower who haven’t had alarm bells ringing in the above paragraphs should have them going off now. As is mentioned in passing in the above, the psychological conception of autonomy that Glassner has is one that is radically separated from history and is in many ways concerned with reconciling the self to the needs of society. Such a direction, outlined in more detail with other psychologists in Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power, has obvious issues both in it’s hermeneutic and therapeutic approach. If I seem to be overtly critical in the end of Glasser, I do not mean to be so. The framework he has employed clearly has genuinely positive effects on unwanted neurotic symptoms that should not be minimized, however I think it’s worth restricting it’s application to certain areas of living rather than propounding it as a panacea.

Review of "Emotional Intelligence"

The research in Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence brought together the current body of scientific literature to derive a holistic picture of how modern science explains the manner in which biochemical interactions in the brain and body effect and are effected by our daily existence. Recognizing that it is impossible for sheer rationality to guide our daily lives as the emotional system flavors every aspect of our existence – Goleman provides a model for understanding how it is that the emotions work, gives numerous examples of their potential to help or harm in specific situations and offers a series of guidelines which, if applied by the conscientious reader or the school teacher, can greatly increase the quality of one’s life.

In the opening chapter we learn the components and order of the neurochemical phenomenology of brain functions. The instinctual, associative area of the brain is the first to receive the neurotransmitter sent from the sense organs while the neocortex, the emotional center, is the second site that receives it and is the one that is able to bring to bear whatever rational responses one has developed over time to the stimulus. One of the popular conceptions of this divide of potential reactive outcomes is “nature vs. nurture”, though a better manner for describing it would be genetic inheritance versus cognitive development.

Emotional intelligence includes empathy, self-control, persistence, the ability to motivate oneself, zeal and the proper mobilization of interpersonal skills. It’s by analyzing these traits that it becomes possible to see that the traditional markers of intelligence may make one an ideal candidate for a position as a lecturing professor however the lack of emotional intelligence trait means that one will be poorly suited to manage their relations and selves in periods of crises imagined or real. Goleman is not an essentialist his valuation of all emotions. Sometimes “positive” qualities, due to the vicissitudes of circumstance can a normally positive emotion for successful activity a maladaption the face of reality. Not all emotions however are capable of being beneficial to the experience given the right context. Worrying, for instance, is not a manner for dealing with potential problems but a form of paralysis as new solutions to issues doesn’t come from worrying nor does it affect the feared outcome.

Bringing this emotional intelligence to our awareness alters the manner in which us as the observer assesses the situation and can thus lead to an increased number of potential responses to it based upon which outcomes are considered to be most appropriate, desirable, etc. Those with interpersonal, emotional intelligences are better able to organize and co-ordinate groups, negotiate solutions to issues that flare up, make personal connections and have insight into others feelings, concerns and motives. Goleman moves from these observation to a series of anecdotes where people aren’t able to gain control of emotions that are “affecting them” like as if they were foreign spirits inhabiting their bodies rather than “being affected” by people in a particularly trying set of circumstances. The results of those that can’t control them are the opposite of the self-mastery, both as in such circumstance the individual is not controlling the self and as such abdication of agency typically leads to negative outcomes – be it depression, anxiety, etc. Such emotions can be specific and feel as if they are “flooding” in at times or can be generalized. These temperaments, however, are not destiny and can be changed by various practices.

In contradistinction to this flooding of emotions deleterious to human happiness is the possibility of reaching a state of “flow”. In Goleman’s terms this is “…a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture. Because flow feels so good, it it intrinsically rewarding. It is a state in which people become interlay absorbed in what they are doing, paying undivided attention to the task, their awareness merged with their actions” (91). To describe the process on more poetic terms, specifically that of Yeats, we could say that flow is when “the dancer becomes the dance” and is an ideal manner of existence that is described in various contemplative religious traditions.

Following these wide strokes on the impact of the emotions of one’s romantic and work life, Goleman delves into the social and physical aspects of emotions. Interpersonally the arts of emotional intelligence apply to the manner in which people display their emotions – where they minimize shows of emotion, exaggerate it or substitute. Emotions are transmittable and indeed those which we describe are charismatic are those that can elicit in others their attitudes. Indeed, emotions also have a significant impact on human health with those that are positive having a not just having a happier but healthier existence.

A final note worth mentioning is the author’s multiple positive references to Aristotle, specifically Nicomachean Ethics, which two-thousand plus years ago came to many of the same conclusions as Goleman. I mention this both for it’s general noteworthiness, and as a part of my FICAM training I’m returning to much of my previous philosophical training as a means of supplementing it by bringing problematics which which I think are worth tarrying. Put briefly, I specifically plan to bring together the FICAM reading with modern developmentalist perspectives in the Hegelian vein, such as Gillian Rose’s social model and Catherine Malabou’s individualistic approach and her concern with various form of brain plasticity (developmental, modulational and reparative). This will be something further worked on in abloom post, but thought it worth mentioning.

Review of "Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ"

In trying to come up with a reading list for a Nietzsche seminar that I imagine teaching at some point in the future I read Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. An astute thinker need not be aware of Nietzsche’s compelling style to to ask why read secondary literature when his own work is available. Answering such a question bespeaks one of the general problematics of Nietzsche scholarship and presents an excellent manner of opening to Kauffman’s account of Nietzsche.

In contradistinction to the manner in which Nietzsche desired to be read, Kaufmann presents a systematic approach of his work. Nietzsche himself did not write this way, instead he adapted his earlier thoughts to new considerations rather than simply refuting old ones, he posed what he saw were the most important questions and sometimes was only able to come up with partial answers, he wrote beautiful aphorisms using rich symbolic language which was to be appreciated and considered for it’s pith, beauty and the readers resonance with it rather than constructing logical edifices. This is not said to give traction to the claims of some readers of Nietzsche that categorize him as an irrationalist – but to show that the project of coming to grips with his thought requires a similar amount of patience and dedication that one would give to a sage. He wants you to read his entire work, slowly, and then start to respond to him. This is just one of several aspects which make Nietzsche difficult to approach in a classroom setting unless one is to read all or a majority of the Nietzsche books and essays. To give a real-world example of such difficultly in teaching Nietzsche, it’s worth mentioning here is that while taking a course on Nietzsche at NYU with Dr. Friedrich Ulfers our assigned reading consisted primarily of sections from The Will to Power as well as a number of essays written by the professor. Having read most of Nietzsche’s work on my own prior to this I found the course reading list appropriate, though it was clear from the questions asked by participants that reading selections and The Will to Power left them with gaps of understanding.

One of the admirable traits of Kaufmann’s work in this book is his scholarship. There are never claims that aren’t densely contextualized, different positions than Kaufmann’s own are explained and then shown to be risible concepts that are only the other author’s attempt to co-opt. Nietzsche That said, in many an academic circle Kaufmann is seen as a tamer of Nietzsche. I think this is a fair assessment, though I don’t think that this devalues his points of exegesis. In this book specifically he is interested in dealing with three major themes of Nietzsche’s work – his particular contribution to philosophy, his depth analysis of the human spirit and what it means to Nietzsche to be an “Anti-Christ”. Put more simply, the books is concerned priorly with Nietzsche’s thought as it relates to Psychology, Philosophy and Christianity.

As it relates to psychology, Nietzsche is widely recognized as the first depth psychologist. His character studies and examinations of history led him to understand the individual as being motivated not only by the desire for peace or pleasure but also power. Power as a motivating force may not be the one that leads the individual into a quiet life but this, Nietzsche states, is not always desirable or laudable. Kauffman shows how it is that Nietzsche holds the difference between great men and men to be of a greater degree of difference that that between an average man and an animal. The reason for this is that those that are merely acted upon and are unable to make themselves are just like the animals while those that are able to manage their passions and organize them in an artful way are the true inheritors of the divine potential within all. The ascetic/philosopher, artist and politician are the primary persons able to actualize this and they do so via “… the sublimation of their impulses, in the organization of the chaos of their passions, an in man’s giving “style” to his own character.” (252). Accomplishing this includes ridding oneself of erroneous thought as well as drastically limiting oneself by uniting the spirit and letting go of debilitating beliefs. While his deference to Aristotelan notions of habit and being prevent him from becoming a total vitalist, it is clear that his understanding of the potentials of humans is great should they truly make the decision to be so.

One of the things that I particularly like of Nietzche’s thought, upon which Kauffman makes a point of in the section on Sublimation, Geist, and Eros is the ridicule of the “pure spirit” that is supposed to exist after the body has died. He ties this connection of the pure spirit to a distrust or denigration of the human body and the willingness to subsume rationality, to castrate the mind in favor of an dangerous idealism. This is important as is bespeaks his deep concern with human self-realization and is connected to his notion of Amor Fati. Amor Fati, or love of one’s fate, is a formula which, paraphrasing Ecce Homo, holds that nothing that is may be subtracted from one’s self and that nothing is dispensable. Including every element in the material past which lead to the construction of the self up until the present one is better able to intellectually and totally sublimate oneself. Using faulty steps leads to a poorly integrated personality. The Overman does not hold mystical notions as he is content with the facts, as sublime or horrendous as they may be, as the manner in which he will actualize himself.

While Nietzsche is oft-quoted, mistakingly, as originating the quote “God is Dead”, his actual relationship to Christianity is much more complex than a simple repudiation of it as a mythical system created by a once nomadic tribe of people occupied by an imperial power.Towards the end of his life he signed his letters “the crucified one” and his contention with Christianity has more to do with the hypocrisies of the adherents rather than the distaste for the man. Christianity ethics as such he holds as being resentful, but he sees greatness in Christ who is in many ways similar to the other spiritual ideal which he respects, Socrates. Both were combatants against the prevailing statist logic that degraded the human spirit, a tradition which Nietzsche places himself in.

As a philosopher Nietzsche styled himself in opposition to another German philosophical giant, Hegel. Kauffman in this and his work on Hegel, however, points out that the two were often in agreement on many things despite purported fundamental differences. The holist-perspectivistic duality is something that, at least accord to Nietzsche, cannot be crossed however Hegel’s recognition of it is important to qualifying some of Nietzsche’s more bombastic claims. Also worth mentioning, thought not addressed in the book, is Nietzsche’s lauding by left and right political philosophers. The American anarchist Emma Goldman lectured extensively on him and as Corey Robin’srecent article illustrates, his writing also had a profound influence on the Austrian Right.

Review of "A New Earth"

There are few books with which I have had more difficulty in getting through than A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle. It was not the density of his prose, my inability to grasp what was being written but that I was constantly writing critical comments in the margins next to absurd propositions conceived of as esoteric nuggets of wisdom and my constant state of surprise at the logical leaps that he made, not to mention it’s lack of academic rigor. While adherence to generally standardized regulations for intellectual compositions aren’t something most people use when making value judgements about what they are reading, especially in the realm of popular literature, caring more for the “feelings” it gives them instead, it is worth noting those objections in order to better ascertain the validity of Tolle’s position.

There are a total of thirty citations found in the Notes section of A New Earth and of these there are a total of twelve different texts. 19 of them are from the New Testament, two are from Shakespeare, and there is one each from works by Hafiz, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Lao Tzu, one of the Upanishads, A Course In Miracles, a New York Times article and a statistic for the U.S. Department of Justice. While it is common to relate one’s own positions to the literature which came before it in order to show knowledge and mastery of material – we see here that Tolle doesn’t do this and that one of the intellectually troubling aspects of the book is in its use of other people’s perspectives to justify his own position when they fundamentally disagree with him.

One such example of this occurs on page 235, where Tolle quotes Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “For happiness, how little suffices for happiness! … the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye glance – little maketh up the best happiness. Be still.” Just as there are lies, dirty lies and statistics – any person who has been trained with high standards of academic discipline will tell you that it is quite easy to misrepresent someone by decontextualizing a quote. This Tolle does by saying that this is evidence that Nietzsche, a seminal authority on human thought as the forefather of depth psychology, justifies his position that it is the simplest things in life, like nature, which lead to the greatest happiness.

For one, there is the explicit claim that a character through which Nietzsche used to clarify some of his own positions, Zarathustra, is in fact Nietzsche himself. As a variation of the bildungsroman and as other scholars working of Nietzsche’s oeuvre have noted, it is clear that all that Zarathustra says is in fact not meant to indicate Nietzsche’s final position as it evolves over the course of his life any more than we are to take Werther to be Goethe, or Kierkegaard to be any of his many pen names. This is not to say that Nietzsche did not use Zarathustra as a mouthpiece for some of his ideas, but Nietzsche’s use of irony and writing style defies any such cut and paste hermeneutics. We able to discern this not just through Tolle’s misattribution of who spoke the text but by looking further in his work to see if the two actually share the same notion of happiness.

It is widely noted by Nietzsche scholars that as a result of his philosophical and psychological investigations he did not propound that the type of “happiness” which Tolle describes (and ascribes to Nietzsche) was the ideal to which human being do or ought to aspire. As noted Nietzsche scholar and translator Walter Kauffman puts it in Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, in a statement that seems almost to anticipate Tolle’s misreading: “Every pleasurable sensation, however trivial – the smell of a flower or the taste of cold water – is valued for his own sake. The indefinite addition of such pleasures, however, does not make for happiness…” (Kauffman 279). The dissonance between their notions of happiness is not unique and there are many other points of departure.

In addition to this quote used by Tolle, there is other evidence of his misprision of Nietzsche as a supporter of the “inner space” happiness that Tolle claims is a state to which people should aspire. Shortly following this quotation, Tolle writes that people should focus just on the “being conscious” and “add nothing to it” so that all of the physical attributes fall away and you thus connect to the “spacious womb of creation (Tolle 236). While Nietzsche recognized that one could attempt to negate oneself though such a practice, he felt that doing so was not a sign of spiritual strength but of weakness. Tolle wants to negate conflict and drama, whereas Nietzsche sees these as the human, all to human qualities which can lead people to greatness and self-overcoming. The areas of divergence between the two are myriad, yet the reader uninformed of them reads not of it and thus assumes that the two are in agreement on this point. Unfortunately Nietzsche is not alone in receiving this type of aggressive misreading that Tolle imposes on them in order to justify positions that is fundamentally at odds with their own work.

While I’ll not speak on behalf of Tolle’s biblical scholarship, suffice it to say it’s worth noting that Richard Abanes published A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller in order to delineate Tolle’s perceived misuse of the Bible. While I’m not qualified to comment on it as Biblical exegesis is not my specialty nor have I read Abanes’ criticism, something that does strike me is his use of Jean Paul-Sartre. Before I speak on this, however, I must contextualize A New Earth so that I don’t give Tolle the same foul treatment that he gives others.

If one looks to find examples of human history on earth in A New Earth, one will find a dearth of them. Discussions on history and social policy are almost staggeringly absent. Tolle claims that because the Now doesn’t have any history it’s not necessary. I would provide the counter-interpretation that as Tolle simply doesn’t know much history, he de-emphasizes it to the point of insignificance. What replaces the struggles for social, racial, ethnic and economic justice are instead comments stating that once enough people get in touch with their inner space and find purpose everything just “gets better”. Be Scotfield’s article Why Eckhart Tolle’s Evolutionary Activism Won’t Save Us at Tikkun presents a number of insightful criticisms on Tolle’s model of social and political change that are worth reading. While Scotfield’s incisive comments focus on a small number of the many errors he makes, he is quiet on the points where Tolle addresses what he cites as an alternative to his own conception of how to bring about a better world: socialist politics.

In the few historical descriptions Tolle writes in a New Earth, no other class of people receive the same sort of haughty disdain as Socialists and Communists. On page thirteen Tolle writes: “The history of Communism, originally inspired by noble ideas, clearly illustrates what happens when people attempt to change external reality – create a new earth – without any of the prior change in their inner reality, their state of consciousness. They make plans without taking into account the blueprint for dysfunction that every human being carries within: the ego.” Tolle later goes on to cite Pol Pot and Stalin, two figures renowned for the blood they’ve shed, as examples of applied Marxism and thus evidence of it’s ideological paucity. While no apologist for either of these figures, no historian who has been presented with the evidence would claim that their actions was simply a result of ideas in their head. As it unfolds, for Tolle, Marxism, socialism, communism is just a “materialist” straw man with which to counterpose his amorphous, “spiritualist” enterprise.

Now how does all of this relate to Jean Paul-Sartre? Quite simply, he was an anti-imperialist, reconstructed Marxist. Sartre wrote extensively on how his entire existentialist project was but an offshoot of Marxist models of historical materialism and stood in opposition to the violent excesses of Stalin. Tolle uses another decontextualized and unattributed quote by Sartre to deconstruct Cartesian dualism. However after doing so he then does away with “Sartre’s Insight” a few lines later by claiming that Sartre was unable to perceive the awareness of awareness. He does this to buttress aspects of his intellectual edifice, if one could even look beyond it’s shoddiness and call it that, by saying that following this there is a “new dimension of consciousness which is “awareness of that awareness”, the “egoic mind” defined as it is by a “pain-body”.

Unfortunately, I do not have all of my personal library with me at the moment to pull quotes from Sartre or about him to prove that such a reading of Sartre is false.
Suffice it to say Sartre’s range of concepts, being in an intellectual tradition which includes Marx and Hegel, certainly includes alienation, perspectivism, individual and social consciousness, resentment, different levels of abstraction, etc. In fact not only did they recognize such aspects of the human condition, but they did so while maintaining a position that was deeply at odds with Tolle, thus disallowing any grace to Tolle for his misrepresentation of Sartre due to their valences being different. Where Tolle reifies space and nothingness as the ideal inner state to direct one’s being as according to him it is the only one that brings peace, the philosophy of historical materialist seeks to instrumentalize individual and collective historical agency to bring conflict to a state of peace.

Tolle says people suffer because their “pain-body” sustains injuries due to it’s identifications with the body or ideas at the level of personal experiences or inherited narratives, whereas materialists say that they sustain injuries due to limited access to affordable health care, genocidal policies to dispossess people of their tribal lands and capitalist social relations, etc. As I said before, Scotfield’s article goes into some criticism of this so I won’t repeat them here.

What I will say is that for the above reasons I believe it’s important for readers of Tolle to be aware of his intellectual heritage. His year of graduate studies at Cambridge University was in Latin American literature and what research I have been able to garnish from online articles his emphasis is on ancient and medieval spiritual leaders and mystics. As is clear from the above quotes that I’ve analyzed, if he is familiar with post-enlightenment philosophies, it is only tangentially so and his understanding of them is not just weak but fundamentally wrong. This of course begs the questions as to why it is he would avoid such people considering the giant leaps in human consciousness and experience that have occurred since then. If forced to make an estimation why this is so, and why it is that so many people have taken to Tolle’s A New Earth is not because they want to better know themselves, but as they want to avoid knowing themselves too well for according to Tolle, peace is preferable to drama.

Review of "Autobiography of a Yogi"

One of my supplemental readings for my F.I.C.A.M. courses was Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, which from a quick Goggle search I learned that the book is listed as one of the top 100 most important books in religious literature and was re-read annually by Steve Jobs. Of all the lives that one could read about, be it famous artists with rich and illustrious personal lives, great leaders who play decisive roles in world-historical affairs, etc. the one of a guru is perhaps not the most immediately interesting due to the strict personal discipline required of such a life. Rather than a boring tale, however, Yogananda writes compellingly on his spiritual journey and the wealth of insight and beauty that lay underneath the surface of his life. These words are as deep as those found in the Upanishads, and due to the story which frames it helps show how these ancient Vedic insights are still pertinent to living a fulfilling life today.

Overall I was impressed with the book for the insight that it provides into religious attitudes in India and ashram life, the latter of which I have experienced only as an outsider in India for a short time, but it is clear that the reason for the books popularity is it’s constant engagement with Vedantic thought. As befitting someone that has devoted their life’s work to the propagation of such knowledge, the book is littered with aphorisms and reflections that would cause a good reader to question the assumptions upon which they live and to at least get a glimpse of the profound peace that is possible by becoming master of oneself. Because of this it is impossible to separate these two aspects, something that monists like Yogananda would deny is impossible anyway, though I think it is fitting to say that taken solely as a narrative it is uninteresting though as an expository work of yogic thought it is brilliant. Almost every page is adorned with golden phrases giving insight into the human condition and though at times Yogananda seems overly pre-occupied with justifying his thought by quoting or alluding to other thinkers it is never so much that it becomes overwhelming. His meetings with various spiritual thinkers known (Gandhi, Tagore) and unknown (Yukteswar, Lahiri) allow him to put wise and concise descriptions of the Vedic viewpoint in their mouths that, framed as it is as steps in his spiritual development, don’t come off as didactic.

All of these compliments aside, one of the issues with I have with Hinduism in general and this book in particular is the preservation of beliefs and traditions which have been discredited as lacking in any material basis. This criticism applies to most if not all religious dogmas, and in the context of the book it is prominent in several sections where other yogis are described. In a several of the meetings with the “divine personages” Yogananda describes them as having siddhis, or “special powers”. While there are several siddhis that I would categorize within the realm of scientific possibility, there are also those that defy possibility and which for me ends up detracting from the narrative. For instance in Yogananda’s travels in India he claims to meet people that, haven’t eaten food in years, have been able to turn a wild lion into a vegetarian pet, and are able to transport their image over hundreds of miles to relay messages to someone else. Then there is Babaji, not a person but an immortal incarnation of the divine that works in humble obscurity in order to keep the knowledge of yoga alive. I recognize that to focus on this and neglect the other, positive and powerful aspects of the book I described above is to do it a disservice, however an objection to these kinds of miracles must be raised most specifically as their supposed “powers” take away from the significance of the core tenants they are voicing.