Towards a heart centered cartography
Until early adulthood, I believed that omnipotence belonged to God alone. On the one hand, mistrusting my own interpretation of reality was ego syntonic as it was a consistent message that was engendered in me by cultural norms that invalidate children’s and women’s perspectives to maintain hierarchical and imbalanced structures of power. On the other hand, the deference to God and science worked to displace my own modes of knowing and created internal psychological conflict inside myself that eroded confidence in trusting my own intuition and internal felt sense.
In college I became enthralled by the aura of scientific objective reality. I shed the belief that God is omnipotent, and I beckoned towards science as a place to construct a model of reality and causality.
Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysical model of experience, as defined in his Process Relational Philosophy, presents the iconoclastic notion that truth exists as process, a temporary experiential lived process that concresences only to change and be transformed in the next subsequent moment. Truth is subjected to the weathering evolution of the continuous flow of interrelationality. The shoreline of experience never stops, for as soon as we construct and interpret our perceptual prehensions, the temporal flow elapses and expires into the next unique temporal signature of that specific perspectival moment. The next moment arrives, unfolds and flows open into the next composite set of new conditions that converge and are encoded in the record of universal experiences.
What I walk with now is that there might be a pervasive elusiveness to locating and occupying the abiding companionship of perspectival truth. Inspired by James and Whitehead, I am considering that truth is a mosaic composite of all experience in nature and I recognize that each experient in the composite holds their unique perspectival truth. The experient maps their perspectival position and adds this to the collective identified as the pluriverse.
For Whitehead, nature is everything that exists outside of the human body. He contends that most of our experience is not conscious. Whitehead says we can understand causality through the body. This tracks closely with my experience as a somatic therapist. I am deeply committed to studying how embodiment and cognition operate reciprocally to inform my heuristic understanding of the physical and emotional impact I experience in the natural world.
To engender new possibilities for sensate living we need to reconcile the damage and trauma that the misuse of power has made to our bodies. It's no mystery why philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Richard Kearney refer to the current time as the age of excarnation. Cyber experts promote a future that can liberate us from embodiment. We are both entranced by and complicit to being reconfigured by digital media platforms.
I wonder how my process relational understanding is impacted when my body is defended and not able to receive embodied data. The defenses can be due to chronic emotional defensiveness, depersonalization and numbing, overuse of painkillers, mind altering substances, conditions such as alexithymia, mental and physical health conditions etc. How has the transfer to technology served to function as a decoy for human interaction?
When my sensory and cognitive perceptions are narrowed in felt scope by the infusion of bodily states of fear my ability to skillfully interpret reality is reduced to distorted duplicative reenactments of the past. I endeavor to create a heart centered cartography that references the wisdom of beginner’s mind and the alchemical embodiment of graceful humility.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2023. Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1968. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press.
Anacarnation and returning to the lived body with Richard Kearney
Links to an external site. Brian TreanorLinks to an external site. & James TaylorLinks to an external site. (eds.) New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group (2023)