Layer 383 . . . Finding Your Passion, Ken Robinson, Education, Natural Talents, Happiness, Bildung, Denmark Again, and Human Dignity

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Ken Robinson was on Saturday Live on Radio 4 this morning, talking about his new book.

Thankfully he keeps insisting we think about our undiscovered natural talents, and the sheer waste of millions of people who dislike the work they do because they've never been able to figure out what they're really good at doing, what they really enjoy doing, and the special talent that's hidden within.

Thankfully he keeps on pointing out  that our education system is modelled on the industrial systems of the 19th Century, and is unfit for the 21st.

It's a system that's intended to produce conformity and uniformity. People can't find out what they're good at - only what they're not good at.

Sir Ken's new book is called "The Element - How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything."
http://sirkenrobinson.com/skr/the-element

He went on to say that our education system is preoccupied only with certain types of ability.

"Every country in the world is trying to figure out where to go with education."

There was also discussion about "the happiness question", which is being widely considered here and elsewhere. Is happiness our ultimate goal? What are the conditions under which people are likely to feel most fulfilled? Methinks Oxzen has been here many times before.

A guy called Mathew Rickard   -  a Tibetan Buddhist - is apparently the happiest person in the world - as measured by brainwaves that can indicate levels of peace and contentment.

According to Ken Robinson we need an education system that recognises talents by customising the system for the real needs of learners.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Element-Finding-Passion-Changes-Everything/dp/1846141966

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The really infuriating thing is that Sir Ken and his committee of enquiry pretty much said all of this more than 10 years ago, in "All Our Futures - Creativity, Culture and Education", and was totally ignored by politicians and bureaucrats, who simply continue to ignore anything that goes against their dull and counterproductive obsession with academic attainment.

 http://www.cypni.org.uk/downloads/alloutfutures.pdf

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Happiness index to gauge Britain's national mood
Despite 'nervousness', David Cameron wants measure of wellbeing to steer government policy 

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/nov/14/happiness-index-britain-national-mood

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What philosophy tells us about the happiness index
 

Thinkers from Bentham to Heidegger saw measuring happiness as more than just a box-ticking exercise
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/15/happiness-index-philosophy

Aristotle recognised that, unlike some other branches of philosophical enquiry, ethics is not an exact science.

In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant made this point even more strongly: of course we all desire happiness, said Kant, but we do not know what it is or how it will be achieved. Anyone who has pursued something in the hope that it will make her or him happy – whether this be a career path, a relationship, or a holiday – only to find it disappointing, and even a source of stress and anxiety, will know what Kant was talking about.

However, the government's plan to measure happiness raises a further and perhaps more profound philosophical question: regardless of whether this is possible in practice, is it the best way of thinking, even in principle, about what it is to live a good human life?

The essence of technology, argued Heidegger, lies in the idea that life is something to be controlled and mastered . . . Heidegger linked the accelerating domination of technology in the 20th century with the idea that modern humanity faces a spiritual crisis. According to this view, utilitarian approaches to ethics in general, and attempts to measure and regulate happiness in particular, are symptoms of this crisis rather than solutions to it.
 

Perhaps the wisest people are those who . . . recognise that happiness cannot be engineered, for it comes and goes, more like a gift that is given than a commodity that is produced.

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Can a happiness index really measure our wellbeing? See how we compare to the rest of Europe

Can you really create a happiness index? As the government gets set to give it a go, see how the national wellbeing accounts score each country

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/15/happiness-index-wellbeing-nef

Denmark is top!

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Measuring happiness, the French way

French national statistics office produces guidelines on measuring well-being as precursor to national happiness index

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/17/france-happiness-index

Crucially, it was easier to measure unhappiness, so the French team focussed on assessing those who felt they were missing out.

"You can't measure happiness, it's impossible, people don't have the same preferences for what makes them happy," said Stéfan Lollivier, director of social studies at Insee. "But you can measure the fraction of people who are dissatisfied, who think they are unhappy, and the proportion of people who are missing out on happiness or feel excluded from it."
 

The figures showed single-parent families were the most likely to miss out on happiness. More than one French person in five had gone through a period of "poverty" in their lives - not just financial poverty but an overall lack of wellbeing.

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I've managed to find an almost-interesting article by Peter Mortimore. Dull writing style, but important subject matter.

The Nordic countries could teach us about teamwork in education

English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish policy researchers could learn a lot from each other if we followed the example of the Nordic countries

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/05/education-policy-nordic-countries

The Unicef survey of children's national conditions, like the "happiness" scale drawn up by researchers at York University, firmly places the Nordics among the best and the UK among the worst. And an OECD analysis of "earnings mobility" and "income inequality" show that Nordic countries are high on the former and low on the latter – in direct contrast to UK figures.

Our politicians, of all parties, appear fascinated by Nordic education although, up to now, it has been Sweden's policy of school choice rather than the impressive success of Finnish comprehensives on which they have focused. If only they could free themselves from their ideologies and switch their interests, they would learn a great deal about how to improve the academic success of all pupils in all schools.
 

In comparison with the UK, the Nordic countries generally have more land, but far fewer people. They are a little richer, but more equal. They traditionally also spend more on education than the UK. In terms of values, they are committed to the idea of bildung – a difficult-to-translate German word often taken to mean the formation of a child within an education milieu that aspires to liberty and human dignity as well as academic prowess.

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What on earth is Gove up to now?

Teachers need emotional as well as academic intelligence, says Gove

• Minister insists recruits should be from 'top tier'
• Education white paper promises training change
 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/19/teachers-emotional-intelligence-michael-gove

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Gore Vidal tells this apparently true story about happiness:

Harold MacMillan was dining with the De Gaulles. He asked Madame what she was hoping for in her retirement years.

"A penis", she replied.

Seeing the perplexed look on Harold's face, Charles leans over and says, "What Madame means is, 'appiness."
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Layer 130 . . . The Spirit Level, The Decisive Moment, and the Bankers

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Start The Week this morning featured a book called The Spirit Level, by Wilkinson & Picket. http://www.thersa.org/events/our-events/the-spirit-level

Its thesis is that societies which are more equal are healthier. Sweden, Norway, Japan, etc. They have better mental health, less violence, less bullying, less obesity, less crime, smaller prison populations, less teenage pregnancy.

Societies like ours suffer from high levels of “status competition and status anxiety”. And high levels of status consumption.

We therefore have more debt, and more bankruptcies,

We must look again at issues of equality and values. What is the good life? Material standards? More time for contact with families and friends, for proper relaxation, for personal creative pursuits?

The rich must in future pay a greater percentage in taxes.

All of this is well and good, but I think it’s already been written about by Oliver James in ‘Affluenza’, a brilliant book which I'll return to. A real must-read book.

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This week’s Book of the Week on Radio 4 is The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind, by Jonah Lehrer.

Here’s a review in the New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126962.500-review-the-decisive-moment-how-the-brain-makes-up-its-mind-by-jonah-lehrer.html

And another in The Guardian last Saturday: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/28/decisive-moment-element-lehrer-robinson

The Guardian quite cleverly reviews the book alongside another called The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, by Ken Robinson & Lou Aronica.

Weirdly, though, this review never refers to the word “passion”, which is surely the crux of the matter. The problem for all these authors is that they can’t or don’t differentiate between passion, emotion, instinct and intuition.

“Emotions are a crucial part of the decision-making process”, says Lehrer, and it’s true that reactions such as fight, flight and freeze, which appear on the surface of things to be emotions, are key determiners of how we behave. But if we look more closely, we ought to realise that those reactions are part of our instinctual, not our emotional, behaviour. Emotions are primarily negative and stem from our social interactions - anger, greed, jealousy, etc.

Emotions are negative elements that arise from un-intelligence. Emotional intelligence consists of getting a conscious and rational grip on them, and not letting them control us. There’s nothing “intelligent” about emotions, as such - quite the opposite. Emotional intelligence arises from calmness, objectivity, restraint of the ego, and in many cases control of the instincts that are urging us towards fight or flight - although those instincts can be life-savers in certain situations.

It’s so annoying when people talk about and write books about the importance of “emotions” and “instincts” when they actually mean “intuition” and “empathy” and “passion”.

Lehrer says, “When the emotional centres in the brain are damaged or removed, mundane choices become excruciatingly difficult,” when he’s probably talking about the removal of the intuitive and empathetic centres.

He says, for example, “Shooting a film with a multi-camera set-up, as a director you don’t have time to carefully consider each decision - it’s all very instinctual - you just know how things should go”. Which is partly true, in the sense that decision-making by skilled practitioners becomes automatic from practice and experience - but he then goes and spoils it by saying “It all depends on the emotional brain.” No it doesn’t - it’s about memory, learning from experience, and about instinct and intuition. Nothing to do with flaming emotions!

“The process of thinking requires feeling,” he says, which is also true, but again he’s using ‘feeling’ as a synonym for ‘emotion’, which it isn’t. Or rather - it is, because it’s become that, in our dumb society, but it shouldn’t be!

“Reason without emotion is impotent.” Again, no! We can do very nicely without emotion. What we need in order to be potent, and to be effective, is instinct, intuition, passion and empathy, together with a well-developed intellect, and all of them working together harmoniously, preferably during periods of ‘meditation’ or reflection, rather than under pressure during an emergency.

http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/Buddhism/footsteps.htm

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Andrew Rawnsley wrote an excellent column in yesterday’s Observer:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/01/fred-goodwin-pension-rbs

These bankers are lucky that they are not going to jail.

The government has been too timid about confronting these failed financiers. It's time that it showed some teeth.

Assuming it is out of the question to hang, draw and quarter Sir Fred Goodwin, pluck out his intestines while they are still warm and wriggling, stuff them into his greedy mouth and then display his severed head on a spike at the Tower of London, could we settle for shooting him instead? Yes, I know, I'm going soft.

Politicians can use whatever adjectives they like to deplore this banker and his wretched ilk for demanding gargantuan rewards for abject failures. The issue is, what is to be done about it? Bankers are hated by the voters, universally pilloried in the media and their excesses have been condemned by every political party from the SWP to the BNP and all points between. And yet still they don't give a damn.

Exhortation and condemnation is wasted breath unless it is accompanied by action. Even though the bankers are now supplicants to the taxpayer, the government is still showing them far too much reverence. Having been in thrall to the erstwhile masters of the universe for a generation, the political class has still not entirely shed its deference to the fallen money changers.

Even though the banking system is now effectively nationalised, Gordon Brown wants to keep his distance from managing it. That leaves the government with responsibility while still being highly hesitant about exercising control.

Ministers mutter that contractual obligations make it all very difficult. Yet it should not be beyond the capacity of the politicians to cut through the legal thicket. This is one of the advantages of being the government: if the law is an ass, you can change it. Had RBS been any other sort of business, it would now be bust. But for the billions poured in by the taxpayer, this bank would be kaput. There would be no pension honey pot for Sir Fred to stick his paw in. If the law is the problem with stopping him, then the law can be changed.

The voters have seen things more clearly. Their fury with the feckless financiers has cut through the complexities that fog the minds of ministers. The bankers behaved with an arrogant recklessness which broke their own businesses and devastated large sections of the economy.

Now they are getting bailed out with everyone else's money. Bankers should be grateful if they still have a job and relieved that they have not been lynched. They should not be slurping up enormous bonuses and vast pensions. End of story.

The politicians have lacked the clarity of that anger. Even after the bankers had wrecked the financial system, ministers were hesitant about putting them in their place.

If Sir Fred was bothered about what everyone thought of him, he would have long ago left the country to live the rest of his life caring for the destitute of Mongolia. Men like Fred the Shred do not feel shame. They feel only for their wallets.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Barack Obama has had a clearer eye about what he is dealing with, and therefore a firmer grasp of what needs to be done. The president, being new to office and of a younger generation than Gordon Brown, is not trapped by the past compromises with casino capitalism which were made by the prime minister and other centre-left leaders of his vintage. Obama did not hesitate. He crisply told bankers that their salaries would be capped and that they could forget about pocketing any more bonuses until the taxpayers had got their money back.

In his speech a few days ago to both houses of Congress, the new president gave a compelling and unflinching account of the vices of the bubble years. "The fact is our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he told America. "We have lived through an era where too often short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity." He used the pulpit of the presidency to tell his people that they had arrived at a "day of reckoning".

I recommend that the prime minister watches Obama's address to Congress. That succeeded because he gave a candid account of what went wrong during the bubble years and that allowed him to be persuasive about how it can be put right. How does Gordon Brown follow that? He could do a lot worse than copy it.

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Charlie Brooker’s column is better than ever today, cynical, funny and very angry, and relates to what I was saying in Layer 129 about people waking up to reality. It also sits with what Andrew Rawnsley is saying about bankers and politicians. Here’s a couple of Charlie quotes:

It's all over. The politicians have finally shut us out of their game for good and we have nowhere left to turn. We're not part of their world any more. We don't even speak the same language. We're the ants in their garden. The bacteria in their stools. They have nothing but contempt for us. They snivel and lie and duck questions on torture - on torture, for Christ's sake - while demanding we respect their authority. They monitor our every belch and fart, and insist it's all for our own good.

Straw wrote, "If people were angels there would be no need for government . . . But sadly people are not all angels." That rather makes it sound as though he believes politicians aren't mere people. Maybe they're the gods of Olympus. Maybe that's why they're in charge.

Thing is, they could get away with this bullshit while times were good, while people were comfortable enough to ignore what was happening; when people were focusing on plasma TVs and iPods and celebrity gossip instead of what the politicians were doing - not because they're stupid, but because they know a closed shop when they see one. But now it looks as if those times are at an end, and more and more of us are pulling the dreampipes from the back of our skulls, undergoing a negative epiphany; blinking into the cold light of day.

Consequently the police are preparing for a "summer of rage". To the powers that be, that probably just means more tiny monochrome blobs jumping up and down on the long-distance monitor for their amusement. Should it turn out to be more visceral than that, they'll have no one to blame but themselves.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/02/charlie-brooker-politicians

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Gary Young’s column today is one of his very best:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/02/obama-administration-ambitions

It's about to get nasty: time for Obama's movement to get moving.
On Monday he held a bipartisan fiscal summit where he pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. On Tuesday he addressed both houses of Congress for the first time, promising the nation: "We will recover, we will rebuild." On Thursday he produced a budget that set out to redistribute wealth, heal the sick and save the planet. On Friday he stopped the war. On Saturday he threw down the gauntlet to special interests and lobbyists. And on the seventh day he rested.

In the course of a regular presidency, any one of these might be seen as a bold project. To tackle them all in one term seems ambitious to the point of foolhardiness. To announce them all in one week lies somewhere between the audacity of hope and the pugnacity of hubris.

But then this is no regular presidency - a function not just of the man but the times. "You never let a serious crisis go to waste," his chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, told reporters after the election. And this crisis is serious.

This is the planet’s only real hope - that Obama uses the Shock Doctrine against its originators, and moves very quickly to change the things that need changing. As described above, he’s certainly not hanging around.

Domestically he has committed himself to a paradigm-shifting budget that marks a decisive break with more than a generation of neoliberal policies. The notion that taxes can go up as well as down, that the government has the ability and duty to do good, and that tackling inequality has moral values challenge the core assumptions that have dominated political culture in London and Washington for almost three decades. It is an agenda that Labour had a mandate to deliver - and wasted.

Those who point to the troop surge and recent elections in Iraq as evidence that the invasion was a success are trying to put lipstick on a pig that has been slaughtered, gutted and turned into chops. The war has killed more than 1 million Iraqis and caused 4 million to flee their homes - half displaced internally and half externally. It has strengthened Iran in the region and created a generation of Islamic fundamentalists worldwide. On every front, by its own tawdry standards, it has been an unmitigated disaster. Its failure is not just humiliating for America's neocons, militarists and Republicans but for the useful idiots who gave them cover, including the British government.

Bush certainly broadened and sharpened disdain for US foreign policy and mobilised huge numbers against it. But he did not invent American imperialism, he just revealed its limits. Those who claim he tarnished America's great reputation abroad were apparently unaware that in vast swaths of Central and South America, the Middle East (with the exception of Israel), the Arab world, and parts of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, it was already pretty grubby.

Obama's budget is a different matter entirely. Its signature elements involve tax increases on families earning more than $250,000 (£175,000), the introduction of a universal healthcare system, an economy-wide carbon-trading system, and grants for low-income students. In short, it intends to address the growing inequalities in American society.

Conservatives are in ideological retreat and organisational disarray. The system they cherish - capitalism - is collapsing around their ears and taking their mantras with it.

The left is better organised than it has been since the 1960s. It has a popular president, controls both houses of Congress, has a grassroots presence and - thanks to eight years of Bush - fire in its belly. A group of leftwing bloggers, unions and other activists have just teamed up to form a leftwing pressure group within the Democratic party. The blogosphere has done for the left what talk radio did for the right in the 1990s - provided the base with a platform and organising potential to put pressure on its leadership.

This week was busy - the weeks to come may also get nasty.

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Jackie Ashley’s column is also worth a read:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/02/labour-policies-opinion-polls

The parties must end this mood of confusion and drift.

On all sides there is everything to fight for. The dominance of the City types is over, and ideology matters again..

Layer 31 Passion and Patience

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The Today programme on Radio 4 just now featured an item on a new production at the National Theatre of “The Taming of the Shrew”. This came shortly after a trailer for ‘In Our Time’ in which Melvyn Bragg was talking about this morning’s programme, which focused on the human brain. He mentioned that Shakespeare had little regard for the brain, by which he meant ‘thought’, compared with his emphasis on the ‘heart’, meaning human passions and emotions.

This was a real coincidence as I’d woken up today thinking about Shakespeare’s regard for patience, as a crucial human ‘virtue’. He speaks of patience in lots of the plays. For example, in Romeo and Juliet: “Be patient. For the world is broad and wide.” (Act 3 Scene 3) That phrase alone is worth a whole session of reflection and meditation.

Needless to say, Romeo, being a young man under the influence of passion and infatuation, has no interest at all in being patient, and no intention of calming his enthusiasm in order to ensure long-term happiness. Obviously his banishment from Verona was seen as the best thing for him - to give him a chance to cool down.

This week I enjoyed a long and stimulating conversation with two good friends about human emotions - whether they are positive or negative, whether they are simple or complex, whether they have components of thought, feeling and intuition as well as passion, and whether passion is the basic or primitive driving force within us, the fiery part, the libido, and so on.

Yesterday’s Guardian featured a letter from a Hillingdon Councillor, Norman Nunn-Price, who was commenting on what the Labour Party needs to do in the wake of last week’s disaster in the local elections. He speaks of anger, and how to channel this emotion in a positive way.

“ There are now many ex-councillors who are very angry at losing their seats. They are now free to be active where it matters - on the streets and doorsteps. This anger must be harnessed.”

Yes indeed. By everyone, every day. If we take the time to reflect on the things that make us angry, then we should think through the ways in which we can constructively use this emotion and the passion that fuels it to eliminate from our lives the things that make us angry. If not, we either have to learn how to live with the anger and whatever‘s causing it, or else let it rip negatively, and to hell with the consequences.

For myself, I’ve always liked the phrase “Don’t get mad, get even.” Given that we can’t prevent ourselves experiencing anger from time to time, it seems to me that what this means is, don’t just let your anger rip and cause havoc in a useless negative way - consider why you feel angry, and who is causing the anger, and act wisely and logically in a way that will either punish or neutralise whoever or whatever caused you to feel angry. Essentially, revenge is a dish best served cold, as the saying has it. Personally I quite like it frozen, on a stick.

Some quotations on Anger:

http://www.cybernation.com/victory/quotations/subjects/quotes_anger.html

Incidentally, Norman Nunn-Price concluded his letter, “The Labour party in Westminster must turn its back on the fat cats in the City and all these media whiz-kids and advisers. Spend the next two years on the streets where people live. Talk to them, listen to them and learn from them. Build up our fighting strength again. Replenish, replace and regroup the shattered battalions. That is the way ahead“.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/may/07/3

Revenge

(Wikipedia has an interesting page on revenge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge)

Working with children and their parents over so many years I frequently had to deal with the notion from the Old Testament of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, and the determination of both the kids and their parents that they needed some sort of revenge on wrongdoers. It was very hard to convince them that the role of the school was to help children learn from their mistakes, and to develop their emotional intelligence.

It was sufficient punishment normally, given that the children did learn from their mistakes and rarely committed the same act of aggression more than once, for them to have to talk through what they had done, and to feel a sense of shame and disgrace. Even more so if their parents were brought in to talk about the matter, which happened whenever children did not learn and did not respond to warnings and demands for better behavior, better self-control, etc.

Learning to control anger can be hard, and some children are just naturally more fiery than others - more inclined to flashes of temper, instant reactions to frustrating situations, more passionate in their likes and dislikes. Both carrot and stick are needed. Praise for successfully staying calm or walking away from stressful situations; and having to experience isolation from their friends and teachers, and deprivation of things they enjoy, as well as counseling sessions and having to reflect on whatever got them into trouble, when things go wrong.

In Our Time - The History of the Brain.

A curiously unsatisfying and superficial edition of the programme. No reference at all to the essential parts of the brain and what functions they perform - the frontal and pre-frontal lobes, the amygdala and the hippocampus.

Aristotle regarded the heart as the most important part of the human body. He dissected animals of every kind. He believed the heart was the major organ of the human body. He thought the arteries were the conduits of ‘sensation’. The brain looks as though it has very little blood, being grey in colour. Therefore he considered the brain was relatively unimportant.

Plato thought the soul controls the human body, and was located in three places - one part being in the brain, one in the heart, one in the guts or liver. But ‘the heart’ is what makes us human. The brain is seen as a kind of ‘wise counselor’.

[Very clever, I think, of Plato to recognise that our ‘souls’ are complex, and made up of thoughts, passions, feelings, etc.]

Galen was a prominent ancient Greek physician, whose theories dominated Western medical science for well over a millennium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen

Shakespeare tended to use ‘the brain’ as almost a term of abuse.

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What ‘In Our Time’ left out.

The amygdala is clearly a vital part of the brain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amigdala

Damage to the amygdala, or perhaps deformation, or under-development, will “produce noticeable changes, including overreaction to all objects, hypoemotionality, loss of fear, hypersexuality, and hyperorality, a condition in which inappropriate objects are placed in the mouth”. Hmmmm.

Problems with the amygdala may also be responsible for Borderline Personality Disorder, paranoia, and autism.

The hippocampus is another key area, controlling memory, inhibition, and a sense of space, it seems. This is one of the first areas to be damaged by the onset of Altzheimer’s.

Borderline Personality Disorder is particularly interesting, since it seems to occur in individuals who have problems with controlling strong passions. Sign and symptoms, according to Wikipedia, can include,

1) Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
2) A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
3) Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
4) Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., promiscuous sex, eating disorders, binge eating, substance abuse, reckless driving).
5) Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-mutilating behavior such as cutting, interfering with the healing of scars, or picking at oneself.
6) Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).
7) Chronic feelings of emptiness, worthlessness.
8) Inappropriate anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
9) Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms
For those of us working in education and life-long learning in emotional and spiritual intelligence the above list provides much food for thought.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_Personality_Disorder

Patience

The cultivation and practice of patience seems to me a vital part of becoming emotionally and spiritually intelligent, as an antidote to excessive passion and a tendency to use it negatively. Easy for an Oxzen to say, you may think, but then again a certain lack of passion or fire in one’s makeup brings its own problems. Ah, the difficulty in finding a balance . . .

http://www.cybernation.com/victory/quotations/subjects/quotes_patience.html

Quotes re patience

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
~ W. H. Auden ~
The two powers which in my opinion constitute a wise man are those of bearing and forbearing.
~ Epictetus ~
Patience means self-suffering.
~ Mahatma Gandhi ~
Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.
~ Barbara Johnson ~
Consider the hour-glass; there is nothing to be accomplished by rattling or shaking; you have to wait patiently until the sand, grain by grain, has run from one funnel into the other.
~ John Christian Morgenstern ~
If I have made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.
~ Sir Isaac Newton ~
Patience makes a woman beautiful in middle age.
~ Elliot Paul ~
Patience in the present, faith in the future, and joy in the doing
~ George Perera ~
In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience.
~ W. B. Prescott ~
Rome was not built in a day.
~ Proverb ~
An ounce of patience is worth a pound of brains.
~ Dutch Proverb ~
There are times when God asks nothing of his children except silence, patience and tears.
~ C. S. Robinson ~
Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.
~ Johann Friedrich Von Schiller ~
Who can be patient in extremes? [Henry Vi]
~ William Shakespeare ~

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Here’s an interesting link to Shakespeare and The Normalisation of Violence.

(I was just thinking this very morning how difficult it is to educate children in non-violence when they are exposed on a daily basis to powerful images of men using everything from knives and swords to guns, tanks, rockets and aircraft to blast their enemies, often in the name of revenge, or justice, or just ‘taking out the bad guys’. Brings back to mind the cap badge worn by our very own Prince Harry - “We do bad things to bad people”. Oh - great!)

The Moderate Voice

http://themoderatevoice.com/at-tmv/newsweek-blogitics/19330/clinton-obama-mccain-and-shakespeare-the-normalization-of-violence/

This contains an interesting reference to Ate

Ate, a Greek word for 'ruin, folly, delusion', is the action performed by the hero, usually because of his/her hubris, or great pride, that leads to his/her death or downfall. There is also a goddess by that name (Até) in Greek mythology, a personification of the same.
In Nonnos' Dionysiaca (11.113), at Hera's instigation Ate persuades the boy Ampelus whom Dionysus passionately loves to impress Dionysus by riding on a bull from which Ampelus subsequently falls and breaks his neck.

In the play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare introduces the goddess Ate as an invocation of vengeance and menace. Mark Antony, lamenting Caesar's murder, envisions "And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate' by his side come hot from Hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war, ..."

http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Ate.html

Layer 30 Destructive Emotions, Driving Passions, Dangerous Ideas.

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We can’t really get to grips with the idea of emotional intelligence unless we sort out our understanding of the emotions themselves - their nature, origins and components. We need to recognise that the emotions are not just elemental forces residing within us, but rather they are complex entities that contain elements of several aspects of ourselves, our psyches.

Certainly an emotion such as jealousy is made up of a combination of knowledge, feelings and imagination. Collins defines feeling jealous as ‘suspicious or fearful of being displaced by a rival’, often involving being resentful and vindictive.

When I’m jealous I know that someone I feel passionate and possessive about is spending time with someone else and enjoying their company. I imagine the object of my affections might like the other person more than they like me, and may even stop seeing me in order to be with the third party. I have no way of knowing whether this is true but I feel bad about the situation, and I imagine I will feel even worse if my fears are realised.

An emotion like jealousy cannot exist without the interplay of the three planes of experience - knowing (ideas), feeling (passions) and imagination (projections). It’s clear that emotions cannot be located within any one of the intelligences or modes of experience. They are in essence the opposite of intelligence, although they may originally have served as a primitive survival mechanism - in the case of jealousy, for example, something that perpetuates the pair-bond by imposing exclusivity and behaving aggressively towards potential interlopers.

Insofar as pair-bonding as a cooperative partnership helps to ensure the well-being and survival of the offspring then jealousy may have had and may still have an evolutionary purpose. Though we may wonder whether exclusivity rather than inclusivity is an efficient process for more highly evolved and more complex species and communities such as humans. Where injury or death is the outcome of jealousy, for instance, we must surely ask ourselves whether this particular emotion is something we need to reign in, control, and perhaps eliminate from our experience.

We may refer to certain assaults as ‘crimes of passion’, for instance, but passion (or libido) can be seen as a force for good in our lives, and therefore to blame assaults on passion is not logical or appropriate. Jealousy is the emotion driving so-called crimes of passion, and we need to see passion and the emotions as distinct and separate.

Besides, assaults are driven as much by ideas as by passion. We have our heads filled with simplistic and often ridiculous ideas which cause us to have warped understandings about ourselves and our behaviour. Ideas rooted within our culture, for instance, serve to regulate our behaviour and our emotions.

People within our society often take it as a given that they should seek retribution and revenge if someone is unfaithful, or if someone shows us ‘disrespect’, or someone steals something (or someone) that ‘belongs’ to us. Many cultures and sub-cultures sanction the use of violence in such circumstances, and the idea of honour can create a very fixed idea that someone would rather die or suffer injury than passively suffer an insult in silence. Yet in other cultures passivism and non-violence are the dominant ideas that regulate behaviour.

Not only are our prisons full of people who commit assaults because they believe that it’s right and proper for them to do so in certain circumstances, we also imprison people whose behaviour is conditioned by the dominant idea that it’s necessary and justifiable to steal something in order to possess it or in order to obtain money.

Clearly the existence of poverty is a key factor in regulating the emotions and therefore regulating behaviour. We currently have a government that once pledged itself to be tough on the causes of crime, but which has done little to tackle those causes.

Poverty is a key cause of crime, and poverty is clearly a relative concept. The people who commit crimes in our country in order to gain something materially and financially are clearly much wealthier than people elsewhere who are literally starving and without possessions, and yet do not commit crimes. Crime is also much higher within countries where people who are unemployed or on low incomes feel themselves to be impoverished in comparison with others in their society and community whose standard of living is much higher. The gap between the poorest and the richest sectors in our society is increasing, not decreasing.

Anger and resentment coupled with an idea that theft and assault are in some circumstances justifiable and necessary are the fuel that drives actions that are considered by most of us to be anti-social, immoral and unethical.

Morals and ethics are maintained in part by the idea that theft and assault, for instance, are in all circumstances bad and unacceptable. Even the very poorest in our society usually desist from the temptation to steal or carry out muggings because they believe such behaviour to be wrong, and in all circumstances they are deemed unjustifiable.

Children who grow up in cultures, sub-cultures and families where crime is seen as acceptable are clearly at risk. Exposure to primitive ideas and modes of thinking, and to adults whose emotions are unregulated by ethical and moral beliefs, is highly toxic to such vulnerable children and young people. Unless we prevent such negative influences governing the thinking and behaviour of our youth then we cannot expect the mere threat of punishment and retribution by mainstream society to have a deterrent effect. In such circumstances prison and fines for criminal behaviour are seen as merely part of life, which can happen to you if you’re ‘unlucky’.

Schools and teachers have a crucial role to play in developing emotional intelligence - in combatting dangerous ideas, and helping young people to develop strategies for dealing with destructive emotions. If emotional intelligence is not being developed in the home and the community, then it's only in the schools that it's going to develop, and will only do so where enough time and enough skilled teaching are devoted to it.

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Short-term ‘fixes’ for crime are bad investments. Government needs to act consistently on two broad fronts in order to create a better and happier society.

1) Social Justice. Through the redistribution of wealth, not necessarily by taking money and wealth away from the better-off sections of society, but through fiscal policy, a higher minimum wage, higher tax credits, etc, and slowing down the growth in the wealth of the better off, we can and should create a fairer and more equal society. We should all welcome this if we care at all about social justice, community cohesion, reduction in crime, and creating a generally happier society where there are lower levels of mental and emotional ill-health, and higher levels of moral and ethical conduct.
2) Education. The basic curriculum needs to consist of learning personal, social, and emotional skills, and developing the social, emotional and spiritual intelligences, as well as developing thinking skills and the acquisition of various forms of knowledge - scientific, mathematical, linguistic, artistic, musical, etc. Children also need to learn how to learn - how to pursue their own learning agendas - and above all learn to love learning for its own sake. They need commitment to their own learning in the broadest possible sense, and as such, commitment to the pursuit of higher levels of ethical and moral conduct and towards being of service of others, which can be characterised as enlightened.

Needless to say, such a social policy agenda, and such an educational agenda, are not currently on offer, even though the rhetoric of government is towards more social justice and better education. To the contrary, the general perception is that lives are more stressful and less happy, that communities are more dangerous, that crime (including cyber-crime and so-called white collar crime such as fraud and identity theft) is more prevalent, that drug-taking and binge drinking are increasing, that childhoods are more toxic, that schools are increasingly exam factories that fail to address the real educational needs of children and fail to develop all of their intelligences or their creativity or foster a genuine love of learning, etc. Something needs to change, and radically.

Layer 23 Zen and the Art of Everything

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The thing I’m most preoccupied with is explaining Zen to myself - with making it clear and intelligible - and being able to pass on that understanding to others. I want my own children to understand it, and therefore I’d like everyone to benefit from that understanding. I think I’ve had some intuitive awareness of Zen for some time, and have benefitted from that awareness, but I want to be able to describe it within a clear and logical framework of understanding.

I believe that Zen is the ultimate expression of enlightenment, and that enlightenment is desirable and necessary for everyone individually and for all of us collectively.

Zen is being able to live life spontaneously and creatively and passionately, with freedom from doubt, and freedom from anxiety about the future. This can happen when we are on track towards greater awareness and greater enlightenment. We put ourselves on that track when we are habitually using and developing all of our intelligences and living fully in three dimensions.

We live in three dimensions when we’re not flattened or constrained by life and living on a single plane of existence. When only two out of the three intelligences (IQ, EQ, SQ) are properly developed and functioning then we will have access to only one of the three Planes of Being, as I’m proposing we call them - the Plane of Knowing, the Plane of Feeling, and the Plane of Imagination.

Mathematically this is interesting - when one axis is missing then only one plane of functioning is accessible. But when there are three axes then this immediately opens up the accessibility of two more planes. In other words, there are dire consequences in not offering our children the possibility of growth in three dimensions.

Zen is a daily diet of something for the head, something for the heart, and something for the hands, for the entire body. Intellect, emotions and spirit. Zen is about balance. Zen is making time in every day - for thinking, for meditating, for reading and studying, for communicating, for laughing, for loving, for sleeping and dreaming, for imagining, for being creative, for socialising, for using our bodies and being active, for using our senses, for experiencing joie de vivre - sheer joy in living.

Zen is about seeing this life as being a cup or a glass that is at least half full, and not focusing on the half empty and giving it too much attention. If we have all of the above elements, or even some of them, in our daily lives, then we must surely have the feeling of life as being at least half full. And we should be giving thanks for that. Zen is about joyful living, and not taking life for granted.

Joie de vivre is about enthusiasm and passion for living, and it’s also about being still and experiencing satori, which is a state of deep relaxation, joyfulness, contentment and bliss. Life is always perfect in the sense that when all of our basic needs have been met then we approach the state of self-actualisation, and we accept that life’s challenges are to be welcomed. They are merely challenges and not threats. So why worry?

Of course we must deal with things that actually threaten us, but if we have a high degree of security and comfort then other sorts of challenge are opportunities to develop our IQ, EQ and SQ, and must be seen as positives rather than negatives. We don’t grow intellectually, emotionally, inter-personally, intra-personally, spiritually, physically, creatively and psychologically unless we engage with challenges, and also challenge ourselves. So why complain about life being full of challenges? Do we not welcome growth?

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I’ve been re-reading some of Zohar & Marshall’s book “Spiritual Intelligence - The Ultimate Intelligence” with a bit of a critical eye. It now seems to me that they don’t have what I feel inclined to call a Zen sensibility, and have more of a mystical and perhaps a Hindu type of perspective. Buddhism grew out of Hinduism. Zen grew out of Buddhism.

I see Zen as being logical and clearly explicable in terms of how our minds, bodies and spirits demonstrably operate, and not at all mystical, and nothing to do with gods or a God, though life may ultimately be a mystery.

Danah Zohar & Ian Marshall, whom I admire enormously for their work on spiritual intelligence, seem to see spiritual intelligence as some sort of deep inner heart of a flower which you find when all of its sepals and petals have been peeled away. Whereas I see it as one of three equally important intelligences that are essential to proper human functioning, and not at the top of a hierarchy or at the centre or the very heart of something. To me, IQ, EQ and SQ are simply three axes, all interlocking and all at right-angles, as it were, to one another.

I see Zen, not spiritual intelligence, as a word and a concept that’s capable of being described as the ultimate intelligence, in that I see it as a circle, or a halo, or a sphere of energy surrounding the sphere of the other 3 intelligences. The degree of Zen we possess and the size of its circle or halo, or whatever, depends on the length and strength of our three axes of intelligence - the extent to which we have developed them, engaged with them and habitually used them as we live and learn. Zen is only a perfect circle or sphere if we possess, develop, enlarge and use all of our intelligences, all three axes.

Zen is above all about just Being. Not being anything special, or different, or wonderful. Just being all that we potentially can be and ought to be. Just being what nature intended, and living life in harmony with our own natures and nature all around us. Surely just Being is a big enough challenge? To be enlightened is to become our true natural selves. And that’s not easy.

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An interesting and perplexing aspect of their work in “Spiritual Intelligence” is Zohar & Marshall’s highlighting of the importance of the imagination, and then failing to really follow through on why and how it’s important. I really wanted to hear something about the practicalities of developing and using imagination to enable us to function better, both individually and collectively.

For instance, they say, on page 154, “In modern psychological terms we might best associate the centre of the self with the source of human imagination, with that deep place within the self from which we dream, or conceive the impossible or the not-yet-existent. In Zen Buddhism the centre is deeper still, a place beyond all imagining . . .

“The centre is a source within ourselves that is replete and inexhaustible and is itself the heart of some wider, perhaps sacred or divine reality. It is at once that which nourishes us and that through which we nourish our own creativity.”

To me, the centre of the self is simply the place where IQ, EQ and SQ intersect at right angles. All three intelligences are potentially engaged in any act of creativity. I don’t see this as being deep or mystical. It’s just logical and sensible, if you accept that there indeed are these three linked and intersecting continuums of intelligence, that is.

Creativity normally requires thought, intuition, passion, instinct, the use of the senses, and empathy. It also derives from Knowing, Feeling and Imagination.

The Plane of Imagination, as I see it, is very distinct from the Planes of Knowing and Feeling, which are to do with WHAT IS, rather than WHAT MIGHT BE. Imagination primarily concerns a combination of our intuition, our senses, our passion, and our empathy with others, and with our surroundings.

Zohar & Marshall quote from John Guarre’s Six Degrees of Separation:

“One of the great tragedies of our time is the death of the imagination. Because what else is paralysis?
I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. [It] . . . is what is most uniquely us.
To face ourselves. That’s the hard thing. The imagination [is] God’s gift to make the act of self-examination bearable. [It] teaches us our limits and how to grow beyond our limits . . . the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to . . .”

Now to me this is pretty much gobbledegook. I can see that paralysis might be the product of a failure to look beyond what already exists and see what might be in the future. It’s pretty hopeless feeling and knowing that there’s a lot wrong with oneself and with the world if you can’t even begin to imagine something better. Even when people explain it to you.

But imagination is not so much a place we’re trying to reach as an aspect of our intelligences that needs to be strong and active alongside our ability to know and our ability to feel. It’s also a vital component of creativity.

Zohar & Marshall go on to conclude, “Our deepest salvation may lie in serving our own deep imagination”.

But what does this mean? Yes - imagination is an absolutely key aspect of human development and human intelligence. But the word ‘salvation’ is in itself highly problematic as far as I’m concerned, and is the product of the type of religious sensibility that lives in fear of hellfire and damnation, or fear of condemnation to the wheel or cycle of whatever.

Why not just say, as a humanist would - not working from a deficit model - that imagination (alongside of, and working with, knowing and feeling) is one of the three keys to self-actualisation, to becoming the very best we can become?

As an educationalist first and foremost I would then have to say, what the hell are we doing in our schools when we pay little or no attention to nurturing and developing children’s imagination, when we fill up all available time with Facts and with Knowing, and when we do everything that’s guaranteed to strangle, stifle and suppress Imagination?

Layer 22 Emotional Intelligence

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This computer’s spell check has just made me realise that the words ‘meditating’ and ‘editing’ have great similarities in both structure and meaning. In states of meditation we allow our unconscious and our conscious awarenesses to connect, communicate, and transform. The work of the editor is to review a whole body of thought or expression, to spot errors and inconsistencies, to highlight misconceptions and flaws, to delete whatever is inappropriate and false, to recognise the need for greater clarity and perspicacity, to come up with ideas for more accurate and more truthful modes of representation and understanding. To be a meditator is to be an editor.

To be a philosopher is to be a meditator and an editor. I take philosophy to be concerned with ways of understanding the world and self. Everyone engages with philosophy at some time, at some level.

I spent the weekend experiencing alternating states of enlightenment and confusion, which, you might rightly say, is the normal human condition. The difference with this weekend was that the ‘enlightenment’ felt quite extreme, and the confusion was extremely perplexing.

Driving south on Saturday I found myself slipping in and out of meditating on IQ and SQ.

In my philosophy the axis of IQ runs from intellectual to instinctual.
Intellectual intelligence can be characterised as “reflective/contemplative”.

Instinctual intelligence can be described as “reactive”. Much of it is pre-programmed into the primitive core of the brain, well away from the frontal lobes where conscious thought is processed. We breathe, we eat, we cry, we laugh, we move instinctually. Through early experiences, when the brain is still forming, we learn to react without conscious thought to various stimuli. Hence flight and fight and freeze reactions. The physical act of sex is clearly instinctual. Though making love involves all of our intelligences.

The axis of SQ (spiritual intelligence) runs from physical to metaphysical (spiritual).
Physical intelligence can be called “sensory”. The senses don’t provide us with ‘facts’, but they do supply us with crucial and clear impressions of our surroundings.

Metaphysical intelligence is essentially “intuitive”. It has nothing to do with facts, or logic, or sensory impressions. Most ‘creative’ ‘thinking’ derives from intuition - sudden revelations or ideas that come into our consciousness seemingly from nowhere. Intuitive thoughts may be triggered by existing ideas and sensory impressions, but they don’t rely on them.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about where intuition fits into the larger scheme of things - where it stems from, and which intelligence it works through. Metaphysical intelligence works through direct KNOWING. It doesn’t need facts or logic or sensory input to make sense of the world. It just KNOWS. Intuition is simply KNOWING.

Prior to the development of ‘scientific’ ways of understanding the world, prior to the ‘Enlightenment’, our KNOWING was essentially through direct experience (use of the senses - physical intelligence) and through intuition. Ever since the Enlightenment these earlier forms of discovery and knowing have been downgraded and seen as somehow belonging to the realm of the ‘feminine’, and therefore inferior or even invalid.

The worship of the intellect and all that can be quantified and categorised has continued apace. Ours is the scientific age. We believe we’re living in the Age of Enlightenment, and yet it seems to me the worship of science and IQ is in itself extremely ignorant, especially when it tries to downgrade and belittle the other types of intelligence. Though to be fair, the more enlightened scientists recognise the value of imagination and intuition.

Driving south I was also meditating on the third axis of intelligence, which connects emotional intelligence with social intelligence, what been referred to as EQ. Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence, inspired me in so many ways, and I’ve thought for some time that I understand what emotional intelligence is, and how it operates.

Suddenly I found myself realising that I’ve been missing something. Something very important to do with emotions. Specifically: what they are, how they operate and how they can be a positive form of intelligence. That’s a very big something to be missing for someone who feels he knows something about emotional intelligence.

Social intelligence is less problematic. Goleman didn’t make this entirely clear, I felt, but I now believe that social intelligence works through empathy. It is in fact empathetic. Without the quality of empathy we cannot relate positively and creatively to others.

Goleman has recently published a book called Social Intelligence, which I’m part way though reading. He clearly thought that social intelligence needed a whole book to itself in order to do justice to it. Empathy seems to me fairly easy to understand, as a concept, though much harder to accomplish in practice, for some people at least.

But emotions? If they are in some senses the antithesis of logic, reason and intuition, and the opposite of empathy, how on earth can they really be seen as an ‘intelligence’? What positive life-force do they possess? What was their evolutionary benefit or necessity? What word encapsulates their positive functioning, if any?

I felt challenged and frustrated by these questions, and spent much of the weekend trying to grapple with them and figure out some answers.

I ask the question about which word encapsulates the positive functioning of emotions, and I say ‘if any’ because I recently finished reading Goleman’s book ‘Destructive Emotions - And How We Can Overcome Them - A Dialogue with the Dalai Lama’. The whole tenor of the book is that emotions are extremely problematic, and as with his ‘Emotional Intelligence’, the need is for us to develop the habit of engaging the intellect, the frontal cortex, and using it to put a brake on the workings of destructive emotions, the key emotions being hatred, greed and jealousy.

Since the outcomes of the unrestrained expression of these emotions are usually so dire, in terms of violence, exploitation, abuse, etc, it’s obvious why we need to apply those brakes. So we need to stop, and think, and remind ourselves of those probable consequences of passionate actions if they are unrestrained, whenever we feel ourselves in the grip of powerful, destructive emotions.

I reckon the emotions are what Freud described as the Id - the dark energy within each of us. Freud (I nearly wrote Fraud) also saw the emotions as something problematic, troubling and potentially destructive, and therefore in need of control by what he called the Superego - the surrounding culture’s commandments and strictures, and its threat of punishment for behaviour that was is any way licentious, anarchic, unorthodox, libidinous, chaotic, nihilistic, etc.

But surely emotions can also be positive? Is love an emotion? Love is impossible to define, but it’s surely possible to experience love - for example a love of life, or for some people a love of God - without emotional engagement. Love can be entirely spiritual, and therefore the emotional realm cannot lay claim to love as belonging to it exclusively. Maybe we can have an intellectual love of mathematics and philosophy. We can love nature, and love art and other works of creation without emotional engagement.

However, it seems fair to say that love is more powerful when the emotions are engaged. So I think what the emotions are really about, their unique factor, their exclusive mode of operation, is PASSION. Here we have a powerful and evocative word and a concept which is also neutral, in that we can be passionate in both a positive as well as a negative way.

We know about crimes of passion. But we also know about loving passionately in a positive way. We can live life passionately. Passion is a driving force, a fire within us. We can use it positively or negatively. Passion provides the energy for our bodies, our minds, our spirits, our relationships, and our ambitions. Passion fuels our creativity. It’s the fuel for the engine, the oven, the furnace, and the boiler. It’s the heat in the sun that makes life possible and worthwhile. It’s the rays that nurture the crops in the fields, the trees in the forests and the life in the seas.

But passion can also cause wars and other sorts of destruction. Passion is potentially very dangerous - like fire, like nuclear power, like ultra-violet rays. It can be toxic and radioactive, carcinogenic and all-consuming. When it’s truly out of control then it can neutralise and eliminate intellect and spirit, and destroy us physically.

It does what it does, and we need to work hard at ensuring its energy is properly harnessed and directed, and consumed in moderation. We cannot binge on it and seek to use it as a stimulant, an opiate, a hallucinogenic or an anti-depressant.

Perhaps for these reasons we need to stop seeing hatred, anger and jealousy as emanating from or residing within the realms of the emotions. Maybe we should see these afflictions as being as much to do with negative ‘thoughts’ and negative ‘feelings’ as merely negative ‘emotions’. Maybe they’re much more complex than mere emotions.

Why not consider the emotional realm as being just a field of energy that has both its light and its dark aspects - containing the potential for both light and dark ‘passion’? Maybe we don’t do this because we find it so difficult to think of emotion (or passion) in the abstract, without attaching it to some other concept. But difficulty shouldn’t prevent us from making the effort and the attempt.

These past few weeks I’ve been enjoying listening to and reading about the various theories, philosophies and ideas circulating in the ether and in the airwaves and in cyberspace concerning our confusion about the nature of reality, consciousness and human perception. Last week’s ‘In Our Time’ on Radio 4 on Materialism was a good example. We’re still arguing about whether the philosophy of materialism makes sense!

Clearly we still have a long way to go in our shared understanding of consciousness, perception and the workings of our brains, our spirits and our souls. We are still trying to figure out whether spirits and souls really exist, let alone whether they’re located in our brains, or elsewhere.

It’s obvious that many scientists are of the view that even if there seems to be a spirit and a soul and they’re situated in and operate within our brain (which seems to be indicated by real-time brain scanners) then they’re really just a physiological and a material phenomenon and therefore they don’t really exist because they’re just a part of the material that’s our brain, and the way it operates, insofar as they believe that the physical brain, the intellect and the spirit are part of our corporeal reality and are therefore synonymous with 'body'. Therefore there is only the material, only the body, and spirit and soul don't actually exist. It’s all nonsense really.

We have this difficulty because of the dominance of science, logic and the intellect in Western philosophy and usually feel the need to investigate phenomena primarily from the basis of ‘scientific’ and data-based research and exploration. Intuitive and metaphysical thinking seems to have little or no validity, and is therefore dismissed as “New Age” or hippy nonsense.

But for now I’m happy to stick with my new thought - that emotions are the energy that causes passion, and what we’ve traditionally called emotions are in fact the by-product of some dark form of the energy we may call passion, and also consist of feelings and ideas that have become negatively warped and twisted.

Therefore anger is just anger, and has components of negative ideas, negative emotions (passion), and negative feelings.

Similarly jealousy is just jealousy. Hatred is just hatred. Resentment is just resentment. Perhaps these can be considered ego-states. They're not emotions as such, or at least they're not emotions pure and simple. Certainly they're the opposite of whatever connects us with others.

Love, on the other hand, is just love, and usually has components of passion, knowledge, input from the senses and feelings.