Category Archives: Meaning

The Waters of Meaning

Christianity, Culture, Meaning, Myth

I was recently reading, in Amy Jeffs’ excellent book ‘Saints’, a remarkable pair of stories about the 6th century Irish Saint Scoithin (pronounced Skuh-heen).

In the first, a man is walking across a field when a ship sails by – across the field. The field remains simultaneously both water and land as the two worlds intersect, while the man has a conversation with a man called Barra on the ship. As he disappears, Barra gives the man the name of Scoithin, which means ‘flower’.

In the second story, Scoithin comes over from Ireland to visit the inspirational St David in Wales. When he is ready to go back, however, there is no ship, so St. David gives him a horse instead. The horse is miraculously able to walk on water, to carry Scoithin back across the sea to Ireland. In the middle of his journey, too, he encounters an island which turns out to be a tamed Leviathan, inhabited by St Brendan, the famous voyager. Brendan first encountered the sea monster on his journey as a threat, but later returned to make his peace with it, and to dwell on it in friendship.

I have been writing much about meaning in my books, and these stories reminded me strongly of the symbolic relationship between meaning and water. We take a ‘deep dive’ to understand something fully; we become ‘immersed’ in a subject; baptism is a symbolic immersion in new meaning, to change the direction of one’s life; the nagas of Buddhist mythology, symbols of wisdom, live deep in the sea. I expect you can find your own parallels. The properties of water lend itself very well to this recurrent metaphor. It is much more flexible than solids, but nevertheless has weight and coheres. It sustains life, but can also threaten it without the context provided by any solidity at all. If water is meaning, then earth (or solidity) is belief. We rely on earth to provide us with practical support and sustenance, but it can easily dry out and become rigid. We may assume it is permanent and final because of its solidity, but it, too, keeps changing form.

In human experience, meaning is all the potential associations that we engage with through the imagination. Words, sounds, and images are meaningful to us because we associate them with other experiences or other symbols. Neurally, meaning is a massive set of links in our brains and nervous systems. Belief is a subset of meaning, a set of associations and links that we have made (or could make) into propositions as the basis of action. However, people constantly confuse meaning and belief by assuming that belief is necessary to meaning, rather than the other way round. Much of my writing about meaning involves a protest against the entrenched representationalist tradition in our thinking, which relentlessly bases meaning on belief rather than belief on meaning. To come back to the metaphor, however, water suffuses earth and allows it to adapt and change: earth is practically dependent on water’s flexibility, but water does not always depend on earth.

Water is thus a potent symbol for the inspirational role of the imagination, allowing us to return to that underlying flexibility when we have become stuck in attitudes that are in conflict with conditions. The first story of Scoithin reminds me particularly of the way that that inspiration is always present, as long as we can maintain a connection to it. Thus although we may have very sophisticated beliefs about the world formatted by our goal-driven and representationally dominated left brain hemispheres, we also need these beliefs to be constantly connected to new possibilities through the sensual and imaginative openness of right brain hemisphere functions. As we walk across the functional, dry field, the flexible sea is always there potentially, sometimes bursting through dramatically. It’s also striking that Scoithin gains his name through a connection with this underlying meaning, not through any construction of beliefs.

In the second story, of Scoithin crossing back to Ireland on a horse, we are also reminded of the ways that meaning can provide us with new beliefs to fit a new situation. The flux of meaning can be ‘firmed up’ at any point so that we can cross into a new situation when we need to do so. This is a practical need in human life. We need the left hemisphere to formulate beliefs about the world and about our actions in it, for entirely practical purposes. The mistake we often make is to assume that the beliefs come first, that they are basic and permanent. The inspiration for this comes from Christian religious tradition in this case, as represented by St. David. It’s also striking that in his encounter with St. Brendan in the middle of his journey, Scoithin encounters an integrative application of such inspirational meaningfulness. Brendan has returned to the Leviathan, not to beat it, but to make peace and develop friendship with it. What we take to be most threatening and uncontrollable only requires new imagination to be reframed in a way that helps us to begin to address the conflict. If two parties to a conflict are dried out and stuck, they remain opposed indefinitely, but to make peace, they need the fluidity to start thinking differently.

The waters of meaning are a crucial aspect of the Middle Way, with both extremes in any conflict locked in by their lack of fluidity. The Five Principles of Middle Way Philosophy all involve making a connection to the waters of meaning rather than only appealing to ‘true’ or ‘false’ beliefs – scepticism critiques solid stuck beliefs by reminding us of watery uncertainty, provisionality formulates new adequately fluid beliefs, incrementality involves thinking in degrees (as water moves), agnosticism defends the sources of the spring against those who would block it up, and integration dissolves the conflict between two solidly dried-up positions.

If we need stories to remind us of the values of the Middle Way, they can be found in the most unexpected places, because practical wisdom can be expressed in the context of any complex human tradition, even if those same traditions have got stuck in their formal expressions of belief. I draw a lot of inspiration from early Christian sources, though I can never subscribe to what are widely understood as ‘Christian beliefs’, which I think miss the point of the meaning that the Christian tradition has tapped into. The underlying symbolism of meaning as water can also be found in all sorts of other contexts.

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My understanding of meaning is discussed in my forthcoming book (Sept 25) Embodied Meaning and Integration, and the inspirational understanding of meaning in religion was also explored in my previous book Archetypes in Religion and Beyond. Amy Jeffs’ book ‘Saints’ is linked here.

Network Stimulus 11: Practice – Integration of Meaning

Meaning, Middle Way Philosophy, Network Stimulus

The next main meeting of the Middle Way Network will be on Sun 11th October 2020 at 7pm UK time on Zoom. This is the second of a series of three talks and discussions focusing on the nature of Middle Way practice: that is, how we can create the conditions for better judgement overcoming conflict in the long-term. We will be looking in turn at the integration of desire, meaning and belief as interdependent aspects of practice, linked to a potentially wide range of specific practices including meditation, the arts, and critical thinking.

There’ll be a short talk on practice as integration of meaning, followed by questions, then discussion in regionalised breakout groups. Some other regionalised groups will meet at other times. If you’re interested in joining us but are not already part of the Network, please see the general Network page to sign up. To catch up on the previous session, on integration of desire, please see this post.

Practice and the Integration of Meaning

Integration of meaning is important to Middle Way practice, because it provides us with the resources we need to draw on (in the development of synaptic links in our brains or associative awareness in our minds, to consider new alternative beliefs. To be able to think differently from the absolute assumptions we may have fallen into, we need to develop the capacity to think differently by understanding and relating to alternative symbols.

It is likely that we already engage in some practices that help to integrate meaning – for instance the arts, education, reading. However, recognising their role helps us to value these practices sufficiently, and see how they inter-relate to other aspects of the process of integration.



Other resources

There is already an introductory video (22 mins) on integration of meaning as part of Middle Way Philosophy, which is embedded below. You might like to watch this for an initial orientation before the session. This is relatively long and detailed in comparison to some of the other introductory videos we have used. A somewhat different approach will be taken in the session.

Here is the video from the actual Network meeting stimulus:

Suggested discussion questions

1. Give your own examples of integration of meaning that you have developed in the past: these could be internal or external, predominantly cognitive or predominantly emotive.

2. Have you ever experienced temporary integration of meaning? How did you benefit from it?

3. In what ways do you increase your stock of symbols?

4. In what sorts of situation in your experience would it be helpful to clarify, and how would this add to integration of meaning?

5. In what ways could tolerance of ambiguity help you to integrate meaning, and in what sorts of circumstances do you most need to practise it?

Suggested further reading

Migglism section 4, ‘The Arts’

Middle Way Philosophy 3: The Integration of Meaning. (See this link for a summary, this link for full text as part of the Omnibus edition)

The Meaning of the Body by Mark Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 2007) on the embodied meaning approach

Fractal adaptivity

Meaning, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Systems Theory,

Should the concept of adaptivity (or adaptiveness) not itself be adaptive? In my work on Middle Way Philosophy, I’ve often found myself arguing that a traditional way of thinking about a concept that may have worked in a past context is too restrictive for the present one. Moving on from the limitations of Buddhist ways of thinking of the Middle Way as lying between ‘eternalism’ and ‘nihilism’ is one example of this, and another (that I’m working on for my next book) is the need to move on from Jungian accounts of archetypes as innate features of the ‘collective unconscious’. In both cases, the alternative needs to be a more universal and thoroughly functional account of the concept, helpful to all people in all places rather than tied to a limiting paradigm. We owe a huge debt to the people who developed these concepts, but need to pass on the flame rather than worshipping the conceptual ashes. So it seems, also, with the concept of adaptivity itself, which for many people is strongly tied to a Darwinian paradigm.

In the basic Darwinian view, adaptivity is a matter of the continuing survival and reproduction of an organism in changing conditions. The organism passes on its genes to its descendants with minor mutations, some of which are better adapted to new conditions and others of which are not. ‘Natural selection’ then ensures that the better adapted organisms survive and reproduce, whilst the less well adapted die out. This kind of adaptivity , however, is a relatively crude. It takes a very long time for significant adaptation to occur, only operates at the level of entire species or sub-species, and requires the maladapted to perish in the process. Nevertheless, many thinkers still seem to think of this as the only acceptable understanding of adaptivity. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for instance, expresses a valuable perspective on the long-term value of our ability to adapt to extreme and unpredictable events, or ‘fat tails’ as he calls them. If our perspective is too short-term, and we fail to take these events into account, even if we appear to be well-adapted to a more limited immediate range of conditions, we lose. However, the kind of adaptiveness he has in mind appears to be only that of survival (even if not strictly only of a species). In this he seems to follow a strand of thinking in evolutionary biology that reduces all other forms of adaptation to that one.

However, adaptation is clearly a much more complex concept than that. It is a feature of a system, and systems may operate at different levels where their goals may not be just the survival of the system (practically necessary though that remains), but rather the fulfilment of a variety of needs. As systems evolve greater complexity, their goals also become more complex. Whilst survival is always the grounding condition on which the development of other goals depends, a hierarchy of ‘higher’ goals can develop in dependence on them. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs expresses those adaptive goals for humans, working up from the social adaptations of belonging and esteem to the individual one of what Maslow called ‘self-actualisation’.But how can we understand Maslow’s insights in the context of adaptation? After all, a reductive evolutionary biologist would probably say that all of these needs boil down to survival in the end, and that even self-actualisation is only adaptive because it helps us solve problems or get on with others in ways that help us survive. I don’t agree that that’s the whole story, though, and it has recently occurred to me that talking in terms of a fractal structure may help to explain the relationships between different types of adaptivity. In a fractal structure, the features of a larger system are reproduced (potentially infinitely) at smaller and smaller scales, the Mandelbrot Set (pictured) being an example of these relationships mathematically turned into an image.

To think of adaptivity in a fractal way, we’ll need to think of a hierarchy of successively smaller systems (smaller both in time and space) dependent on the larger one, but in which the same basic pattern of conditions operates. Exactly how you divide up levels of adaptivity may be a matter of debate, but I think we can distinguish at least four levels: biological, cultural, individual and imaginative. In each case there is a means of transmission of certain features that operates only at that level, a specific selective force that depends on the fulfilment of needs in different conditions, and both reinforcing and balancing types of feedback. I’ve suggested what the features of these four levels might be in the table below, though I’m sure this sketch can be refined.

When we get to the ‘higher’, or more distinctively human, forms of adaptivity, it is our use of symbols to create meaning that seems to be the basis of adaptivity, but operating in three different ways. At a cultural or social level, shared symbols and beliefs help societies to adapt, although rigidity in those symbols and beliefs can also become maladaptive. At this level, safety, belonging and respect start to become important in addition to survival. At an individual level, the development of an individual capacity for meaning and belief through neural links allows that individual to meet all their needs, including self-actualisation. Again, however, rigidity of belief can be maladaptive – this time for the individual. Within the individual, and within a shorter time-frame rather than a whole life, there is finally an imaginative level of adaptivity that is created by our ability to use symbols hypothetically and thus simulate possibilities in our minds. This imaginative process boosts our adaptivity as individuals, helping us to adapt far more quickly than we could do by merely waiting for our previous habits to fail us in new conditions. However, once again, maladaptivity for the individual occurs through the reinforcing feedback of imaginative reconstruction in loops of anxiety or obsession.

I think that these ways of understanding adaptivity help us to distinguish the Middle Way clearly from other kinds of adaptivity to a context. The practice of the Middle Way does not consist in just any kind of balancing feedback loop, but rather the development of awareness required for provisionality. If we can examine alternatives hypothetically, we can not only be freed from reinforcing feedback at the imaginative level, but also start to make an impression on the more basic levels. Provisionality applied consistently and courageously can change both long-term individual development and social beliefs, slow and frustrating though that process may seem when we see our societies going through damaging reinforcing feedback loops. Whether we can successfully influence the biological level is much more debatable.

However refined our thinking as individuals, however, we are still subject to the more basic conditioning of the biological level. As we are increasingly discovering through the climate crisis, the very existence of the more complex and refined systems, both social and individual, is under threat if we cannot maintain the basic conditions for our survival as a species.

Pictures: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs by factoryjoe (Wikimedia Commons). Mandelbrot Set picture of unknown origin. Table of levels of adaptivity by the author.

Distinctive Qualities for the Middle Way

Meaning, Middle Way Philosophy, Practice

This morning, I woke up thinking about what it is that is distinctive about the Middle Way approach that sets it apart from other ways of judging things. To put it more crudely in marketing terms, what is its ‘USP’ or unique selling point? I find that in whatever form I try to convey what the Middle Way is about, many people like to appropriate it into the terms of some tradition or type of thinking that is more familiar to them: for example, Buddhists think of it in Buddhist terms, scientists in scientific terms, and so on. I usually think that they are partially right, but that they are still missing an understanding of what is most distinctive, because synthesis (see different ideas from different sources in relation to each other) is so central to it. So however I try to convey the unique ‘selling point’ of the Middle Way, it will have to be based on a synthesis of different qualities coming together. Those qualities may be found separately in lots of places, but the Middle Way asks one to see them together and in systemic relationship to each other. It starts to arise more fully when they are all brought together.

I worked through a list of lots of different viewpoints, along with what I felt they shared and didn’t share with the Middle Way, and by this means managed in the end to distil a list of five qualities. These qualities, when combined and held together, seem to jointly create a distinctive Middle Way approach, whereas in every other approach that seemed to get near to the Middle Way but not quite hit it, I could identify one of these qualities missing. Of course, in those approaches that are even further from the Middle Way, there will be more than one of them missing. Focusing on these qualities is thus a different (but hopefully complementary) angle from which to understand the Middle Way than the Five Principles that I have been using for some years now. Lets call them the Five Qualities. the five qualities that I identified were synthesis, criticality, gestalt meaning, even-handedness and practice orientation. The diagram below conveys that interdependent aspect.

Firstly, synthesis is the ability to bring ideas together from different places. Without that ability, provisionality, in which we are open to alternative possibilities, is impossible. Synthesis is blocked by domain dependence, where our thinking is stuck in one context where we are used to applying it: for instance, we don’t apply what we learnt at work when we get home. Fixed and essentialised categories can also block synthesis, by making us think in only one way that’s dictated by the framing of the language we’re using: for instance believing that ‘religion’ must be only ever be one kind of thing. The blocking of synthesis is also, in my view, a major problem in academia, where it results in over-specialisation, over-reliance on analysis alone, and relativism about values. Those academic ways of framing things also influence the rest of society.

Secondly, criticality  is the ability to question the current set of assumptions that we are making or are presented with. Even if we are theoretically aware of alternatives, if it doesn’t occur to us to consider the possibility that what we believe might not be true, we can be slaves to confirmation bias, locked into an unhelpful set of assumptions. For instance, people who are mystically inclined may have a highly meaningful, practical and synthetic approach to things, but they also often assume that this view offers ‘ultimate truth’ of some kind. Their failure to apply any criticality to this assumption can again trap them in unhelpful views in practice.

Thirdly, gestalt meaning refers to the recognition of symbols being meaningful because of our embodied experience, channelled through the right hemisphere. This meaning is gestalt because it comes to all at once in an intuition, rather than being conveyed piecemeal. However, when we assemble these gestalt meaning experiences into language through the use of schemas and metaphors, we can use them to express our beliefs, and at that point they become subject to criticality. So putting criticality together with the recognition of gestalt meaning results in the distinction between meaning and belief, and the recognition that we need to treat them in slightly different ways: to appreciate and celebrate meaning, but maintain critical awareness about our beliefs. Many people find this difficult, or are not even aware that it is possible: thus there are many spiritual and artistic people with a strong sense of gestalt meaning but little criticality, and many scientifically or philosophically educated people who are inclined to dismiss anything to do with gestalt meaning as “woo”, because they wrongly assume that it must be a kind of belief that threatens their justified  and critical scientific beliefs. An insufficient openness to gestalt meaning can impoverish our emotional and imaginative lives, and tends to lead us into representational and instrumentalist attitudes in which, for instance, we don’t really respond to others as people like ourselves.

Fourthly, even-handedness is another quality that we need to be able to apply when we are engaging in synthesis, criticality and appreciation of meaning. There are always many different possibilities jostling for our attention, and many different possible beliefs we could adopt. Even-handedness is the capacity to apply a model of balance in our judgements about these, not simply immersing ourselves or committing ourselves to one kind of meaning or belief and completely neglecting another. This is especially important when it comes to dealing with absolute or metaphysical beliefs, as it is so easy to reject one because of its dogmatism without recognising that you are running headlong straight into the arms of its opposite (like people ‘on the rebound’ from a relationship breakup). Even-handedness requires an emotional awareness that the degree of hatred that is likely to accompany your rejection of one view does not have to create a total desire for only one alternative to it.

Finally, practice orientation is the commitment to making your judgements practical and putting them into practice. That will probably mean that you are ‘working on yourself’ through some kind of integrative practice such as meditation, the arts, and/or study, and probably also ‘working on the world’ through some kind of communicative, social or political activity. With practice orientation you are always likely to be asking ‘does this really make a difference in practice?’ and thus have a critical perspective on purely theoretical accounts that take abstract completion as an end in itself. For instance, if someone makes you an argument about the nature of the historical Jesus, you can ask what difference this makes: is it going to change the way that Jesus functions in people’s lives, as a source of advice, inspiration, or archetypal meaning? There are many academic approaches that seem to lack this kind of practice orientation, because they have turned scholarly or scientific investigation within a particular field an end in itself.

Of course, this list may not be complete, and may still be improved upon. But perhaps it can provide another way into the Middle Way, but especially into the question of what is distinctive about it. If you’re not sure about how well a particular approach fits the Middle way, you might like to start by asking whether all five of these qualities are present, at least to some degree.

 

The MWS Podcast 142: Jeremy Sherman on the origin of striving

Books, Meaning, Science,

Our guest today is Jeremy Sherman. Jeremy is a decision theorist researching and writing about choice from the origin of life to everyday living. He teaches college courses across the social sciences and blogs for Psychology Today. He’s here to talk to us about his latest book Neither Ghost nor Machine in which he distils for a general audience the theory developed by renowned neuroscientist Terrence Deacon that extends the breakthrough constraint-based insight that inspired evolutionary, information, and self-organization theory. He argues that emergent dynamics theory provides a testable hypothesis for how mattering arose from matter, function from physics, and means-to-ends behavior from cause-and-effect dynamics. In effect that what this offers, is a physics of purpose and can make science safe for value, We’ll also talk about how this all might relate to the Middle Way



MWS Podcast 142: Jeremy Sherman as audio only:
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