And we're back...

After a pause in activity while domestic matters took precedence, I am back to work on this research.

Here are some further thoughts:

We construct our identity and sense of self as individual, separate from the rest of the world; I and Not I; as a necessary step in becoming ourselves. Adam and Eve, eating from the tree of knowledge became aware of their nakedness – which meant their separation from God. Our first nine months of life spent in the womb are an experience of complete connection, but paradoxically, our emerging consciousness knows only I – everything is I. Only on emergence into the world do we gradually begin to encounter the separation of I from Not I and realise that others are able to do as they please rather than only meet our needs. So from the moment the cord is cut, we begin a journey of making sense of our connectedness to the world. For some, this becomes an insatiable search for reconnection, to meet the need to be seen, heard, accepted, loved and held, in spite of who and what we are.

To be connected is better that to be separated however, for some, being faced with the idea of being connected to everything feels overwhelming and too much, perhaps because of some sort of belief about the limits of their capacity to love or attend to the world and a desire to keep the horizon of their attention to a manageable and controllable sphere. At the heart of this self determined limiting thinking is a fear of some sort.

So we select who or what we connect to; partly consciously partly unconsciously, in response to such fear, as a coping strategy. And so does everyone else, meaning we live in a world that validates and reinforces this choice to fear what we don’t know, what we are not in relationship with.

In our disconnected world, things happen and we don’t know they are a result of our disconnection; war, violence, abuse, neglect, environmental crises, holocaust, drug and other forms of self abuse, pornography, the seeking of power, etc all become possible when we imagine ourselves as separate and therefore seek to win at other’s cost.

We have become so surrounded by the consequences of a disconnected world, we can’t even see it being disconnected any more. Things happen like Benazir Bhutto being assassinated, or China being the largest and fastest growing non-democratic abuse of power and resources in the world, (second only to America which appears to be the same except with a semblance of democracy) and we don’t seem to notice, or we don’t act like we notice. Or perhaps we don’t know how to act? We seem to wait of someone else to take charge, to sort things out. We look to our governments, to the UN, to Bono, to Bill Gates to sort it all out in the manner of fixing a problem, like on a car.

We have forgotten that how we think about ourselves makes things worse.

Perhaps a greater awareness of how things are actually linked (in a scientific way) might foster a remembering of our “collective oneness” that we otherwise forget?

Perhaps if were to ask ourselves which relationships get neglected and why, it might help us notice which relationships we privilege and ask ourselves why?

How does power/money/status become a proxy for relationship?

Perhaps if we able to become fully present, physically emotionally and spiritually, and look towards what is most dear to us, what we care about most, we might remember to love one another and our environment – that which is the same as us - instead of being so scared?

The mental construction of our selves as separate is a choice, what Batson would call an epistemology. Writers as diverse as Buber, Bateson, Berman and Bowlby have all suggested that a collective, connected, relational way of thinking about ourselves might be compared with the prevailing individualistic and separated form of identity. So it becomes interesting to reflect on this question of how we know about ourselves and the processes of socially constructed reality which underlie the formation of these collective beliefs, especially together.