Philosophy: a Path with Heart

By Alan H. Johnson

Philosophy: A Path with Heart is an autobiographically structured story of the authors deeply personal, emotional, and engaging encounter with philosophy, psychology, and spiritual concerns of the mind and heart from the age of thirteen. Significantly more attention is paid to philosophy than biography. The reader is asked to consider the philosophical, moral, political, environmental, and spiritual issues on which the author has reflected, and with which he continues to dance.
He cites in some detail the writings of Barry, Halifax, Harner, Illich, Jung, Kluckhohn, Marx, Parsons, Safina, Swimme, Shills, Tillich, and Wilber. The book attempts to inspire an appreciation of philosophy as an ongoing dialogue with ones self and others. This dialogue is how his or her world is created, and directly responsible for forming the physical, social, and personal space in which they live.
Philosophy is asking more of oneself than facile play with a Smartphone. Philosophy is creating a home for the soul as a house is constructed as a home for the body. What are you building for yourself and those around you?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491898017

Alan H. Johnson

For this author, philosophy is mysteriously seductive, exciting, and nourishing; it has been and remains the intellectual, spiritual, and soulful gyroscope in his life. His intention in writing is to share how this philosophical gyroscope has allowed him to stay afloat, well oriented, spiritually engaged, and sailing on enthusiastically. Perseverance through a BS degree in electrical engineering (RHIT), a master’s degree in philosophy (ISC), two years of study at Union Theological Seminary (NYC), a year and a half study and analysis at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, and a PhD in counseling psychology (ISU) brought him to an enriching and satisfying career in teaching family medicine residents, and clinical practice for thirty-three years (MUSC). Over the last thirty-five years, the author has practiced and taught Tae Kwon Do to children and adults. Now a sixth dan black belt, he will, someday, go to rest in a simple pine casket, wearing a gi and a white belt. For more circular and gracefully intimate exercise, he enjoys dancing with his wife. They share the successes, joys, and frustrations of an ever-growing extended family on two continents.

Book preview

2014 Alan Johnson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   12/04/2015

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9803-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9802-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9801-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014905536

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

I.   Introduction: What Are You Thinking?

II.   Behind the Corncob Curtain

III.   Joining the NFL

IV.   Thinking Outside the Box

V.   A Lifelong Affair

VI.   Alienated Labor

VII.   The Shamanic Quest Begins

VIII.   The Shaman’s Initiation

IX.   Evolutionary Currents in American Schools

X.   Medical Nemesis

XI.   The Balint Seminar

XII.   The Biggest Thing in the Universe

XIII.   All Quadrants All Levels: AQAL

XIV.   An Arch to Build Upon

A.   Hungarians Fight For Freedom

B.   A Report On The Sixth Ecumenical Council Will, Christ, Man

C.   Abstract Of A Dissertation

D.   The Balint Movement In America

E.   The Spiral of Development*

INTRODUCTION: WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?

42825.png

Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.

—Eugene V. Debs

Just what are you thinking? This is my question that goes beyond asking you just to associate freely (even though I am a Jungian therapist). It is the question around which this book will focus. What was it that preceded your thinking and where, as you now become aware of what you thought, are you going to take your thought, your thinking?

There is an old adage that the fish may be the last to discover water. So you, as a thinking person, may be the last to discover the culture of your own thinking, or should I say your thinking culture: the cognitive enclosure, simple or refined, both conscious and semiconscious, that frames all your experience, which is definitely a point that will need further discussion. You may engage at times in such reflection; however, you may not have carried on such a process for any length of time. In fact, it may be an enterprise or activity that you enjoy and pursue even to the point of recording the process magnetically or in writing; you might even consider it a waste of time.

You might have paid a personal coach or therapist several hundred dollars an hour to midwife you through this self-reflective enterprise, or you might have been led into it by a professor who asked you to do some creative writing or research. In an intimate and trusting setting with a friend or lover, you may have been involved in such thinking in trying to say what you most sincerely believed and what you felt most deeply moved to communicate. At a business or community meeting or a political rally, you may have with forethought and passionate intent sought to rally the investment and understanding of others. In a letter or an e-mail, you may have woven your thoughts in a thread of communication to someone who seemed to be sincerely interested in your thoughts. In any of the several settings, you were then initiating a small philosophical enterprise.

Philosophy is that activity where we attempt to say and frame in words that are related, we hope, in some logical order, to a very deeply felt belief, unshakeable intuition, grounding complex of sensations, or only a vaguely emerging thought or feeling. We think in order to find ourselves and begin to glimpse the cognitive space into which we cast ourselves. One could begin such a thinking enterprise as though one were setting out on the most exciting trek. On the other hand, one might begin in a frantic state of fear and trembling as though one were entirely alone in a semiconscious wilderness, dream, or nightmare.

One might be led through a poem, lecture, or book into a cognitive symphony, hypnotically led from one thought to the next in such a way as to feel suddenly a kind of supporting, peaceful harmony and belonging, a coming home. Thinking then became something that you wanted to experience again, something you wanted to begin to create for yourself. It was a joyride of the mind or spirit; it was like discovering that the water was supporting you as you learned to float and then to swim. Just how that support originated wasn’t clear. Ideally, this book will be about helping you with that ongoing creation: first floating, then swimming, and then finding yourself at home in the logical and graceful order of your own thinking.

Later on, I will share with you what has led me into this lifelong pursuit, which in so many interesting ways is coming to fuller realization in writing this book. I also want to recognize, at this point, the fact that not everyone necessarily feels at home in the water or desires to spend time on it or floating, swimming, or diving in it. Likewise, many individuals may not necessarily enjoy exploring or examining the way in which their thinking—or some other person’s thinking—evolves, and the themes, concepts, or values it seeks to imply, present, and scrutinize.

The intention of this book is much more to share a lifelong joy and fascination that comes from my very natural curiosity about life as I live it than any attempt to prescribe some specific way of organizing my life, or anyone else’s, for that matter. I can’t imagine how anyone would read this book as a how-to book. So many significant events, and extended periods, in my life have been lived with only the faintest self-understanding and discerning self-awareness. Consequently, self-understanding at times was a very direct result of study, psychotherapy, encounter group process, and self-reflection; however, at other times, philosophical study only added to my sense of isolation, dissociation, and depression. One can be lost in thought. With and without thought, I have been lost to myself and to others.

Our recorded history shows that certain people have devoted their lives to this enterprise for thousands of years, framing an ideal picture of life, the physical world, the political/social world, and the spiritual or transpersonal world. Philosophy, with these different foci, has taken on different names: psychology, biology, chemistry, physics (the physical sciences), psychology, sociology, anthropology, history (the social sciences), and theology. (You will notice that I have placed psychology in the domains of physical science and social science. This is to honor what I consider to be the rootedness of psychology in both the body and mind.) The social integration and appropriation of these various domains of thinking are realized in art, architecture, engineering, medicine, psychotherapy, litigation, politics, mass communication, and teaching. These too have become domains of personal, public, and academic philosophical inquiry.

In each of these various domains, individuals have attempted to use concepts or ideas that offer some coherent picture of their subjects. The digital or character form taken in these separate disciplines varies from sentences in paragraph form, sentence fragments, or words in poetic stanzas or entirely digital sequences in equation format. These philosophical undertakings have used language of common parlance, and on other occasions, words, characters, and symbols have been introduced in an attempt to address and elucidate their specific subjects.

Just as art takes on many forms—sketching, painting, printmaking, sculpting, writing, dance, and theater—so we are likely to find philosophy in many forms. Some people’s thinking has moved so far as to attempt to integrate these various disciplines in a more all-embracing picture. R. G. Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis is a fine example of such a work that looks at art, religion, science, history, and philosophy in a clear, natural way. I have used it in introductory philosophy classes. I think you might find it most engaging. It is a good place to start. What I hope will begin to emerge for you, the reader, is the sense in which your own thinking begins to take on some personally recognizable form(s) or theme(s), expand and mature in a way that brings you greater satisfaction and a sense of being more at home with yourself, others, and the world around you. I will be working in a format of declarative sentences and paragraphs so you need not become anxious in anticipating mathematical or complex graphical formulations.

I am interested in helping you, as the reader of this book, begin to explore with me your way of thinking and the credibility or validity of some of the ideas or pictures that you hold dear, though perhaps only casually reflected upon and introjected without a thorough mental mastication; you have swallowed values, concepts, images, or descriptors without analysis and discerning reflection. You may have not thoroughly dissected the ideas, ideals, or values that shape your beliefs and behaviors.

In writing this book, I am undertaking with you my further philosophical journey that probably began when I was twelve or thirteen and came to a fuller realization only when I was twenty-two. I am now seventy-four and just beginning to be willing to share in writing the deeper and most thoroughly engaging enterprise of my life. There are various levels of interest or passion that readers will bring to this book. However, if you are willing to reflect with me on what you think is serious, mysterious, intriguing, valuable, ethically necessary, religiously absolute, incomparable in beauty, humorous, a necessity of existence, or any idea of matter or spirit that stalks your conscious life, then you and I, together, should make a good show of it.

It seems as though this work will undoubtedly be interdigitated with my personal history. My intention in writing will be to reflect on my personal history only in those ways that seem to have framed or contextualize how certain ideas began to take shape in my thinking, and may still be influencing me today.

You could say that I am identifying many of the family, social, and cultural values that have framed my thinking. In doing this, I am asking you to begin to look more closely at the way in which spirit, nature, parents or guardians, extended family, community, schools, churches, clubs, cliques, gangs, art, sports, music, film, TV, theater, and national and international figures and leaders have played some part in contextualizing and framing your thinking: what it is that moves you.

In addition, I will be asking you to reflect upon what you alone have experienced within yourself: your physical body and how it mediated your relationship to the world around you as well as the sensations it brought to you personally, what you have dreamed, what you have imagined, and how you have thought. Please appreciate that all of these processes, cognitive and affective, are at play right now as you read these words. We are quite alone and very close together as we begin this philosophical exploration.

BEHIND THE CORNCOB CURTAIN

42856.png

I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me.

—Anne Frank

Following the Second World War, the United States began to talk, negotiate, reason, and rationalize its way into an international confrontation/standoff with the USSR. How much capitalism and communism, as two distinctly different social, political, and economic ideologies, had to do with that is a matter of voluminous, historical speculation and reflection.

You might want to think about the social, political, religious, and economic factors in your life that cause you to see yourself as so different from—or so identified with—certain others. In what do you believe so strongly that the threat of hostility seems unquestionably justified and displaces the possibility of honest disclosure and searching dialogue? This is a topic we will return to later.

These two world powers came to see themselves as distinctly different and separated by what would come to be called the Iron Curtain. Another international power, China, would emerge on the political power chessboard separated from the United States by what would be called a Bamboo Curtain. The curtain that I began to be aware of when starting a master’s program in philosophy at a state teachers college, which soon morphed into a state university, was the Corncob Curtain, a conservative line of demarcation running through Middle America—and through the middle of my life. This was a time of transition to a much larger, very diverse liberal arts environment, just two weeks after graduating from a very conservative, intense, small, private undergraduate baccalaureate program in electrical engineering. I went to an all-male school that required participation in an ROTC program for at least the first two years and integrated military class work, rifle range practice, and weekly parade drills in sharply presented uniform accompanied with an M1 rifle, and in my case, the company guide on.

I first began to think about the Corncob Curtain in ideological terms to denote liberal and conservative political orientations. Coming from Indiana, a historically conservative state, and being part of the great Corn Belt, the term took on real organic and geographic meaning. However, this Corncob Curtain had not separated me from images of the entire planet.

In a room right next to my bedroom, on the second floor of a rental, two-story, double house that I recall from my earliest years (from roughly two until ten), a large map of the world was pinned to the wall. With a very loving, attentive, and conscientious elementary school teacher, my mother, we often identified countries and their geographic locations. Consequently from a very early age, I was geographically not held captive behind the Corncob Curtain. Every nation has its place. The geography was fairly straightforward; however, the historical, cultural, and social dimensions of these many countries would only slowly begin to register in my life.

However, my mother consistently and clearly defined the social and cultural dimensions of my immediate living environment. She was born in 1902 in a small farming community southeast of Indianapolis. On all our outings, she would inform me about people’s roles, appropriate manner of address, acceptable styles of dress for men and women, and the polite way of interacting. She was always ready to answer my questions, and if the immediate social situation precluded a response, she would whisper that she would answer that question later. She was faithful to that promise. I never sensed a duplicity or incongruity in what she told me, the values she represented, or how she truly felt and believed. Her social/cultural map was as clear to me as the world map in the room adjoining my bedroom. Over the ensuing years, both maps would change in form and in identifying new territories, people, and evolving, new, flexible values.

In fact, the most enduring and vivid geographic images of my childhood are not of Western movies with black-hatted bad guys being pulled off of their horses on rocky terrain by faster-riding, white-hatted rescuers, fantasy-land cartoon adventures, or the Three Stooges. The most enduring and reoccurring images are from the newsreels at theaters depicting the American Air Force bombing over Germany and a mushroom cloud rising over Japan. I first was taken to the movies when I was five years old.

It also seems relevant at this point to share the fact that my father, who was born in Indianapolis in 1896, was drafted as a first lieutenant from a university ROTC program in the First World War during his junior year at Purdue University. Fortunately, he was never sent abroad and returned a year later to complete his degree in civil engineering. After his retirement from a long, demanding, and satisfying career as a chief field engineer for the state power utility, he built two large reading lamps for my library and study from three-inch artillery shells that he had saved from Fort Knox. War has always weaved its way into my life. I did not choose this thread; nevertheless, it is part of my fabric.

The German occupation of the Netherlands during the Second World War led an adolescent Jewish girl to write a diary that spoke to my sense of isolation behind the Corncob Curtain. It began to resonate with my budding existential speculations, blooming intellectual curiosity, and emerging scholastic achievement. Before seventh grade, I felt imprisoned in school; thereafter, it became my alchemical laboratory. Anne was inviting me into her world of reflection and speculation—not only of the world around her but also of herself, parental relationships, diverse family dynamics, and her intense attraction to male friendship, leading to romantic attachment. I’m wondering as I write this book if it might have had a similar effect for you, the reader.

I began to read Anne Frank’s diary at about the same age she began writing it. You may want to begin writing your own reflections and speculations before you are seventy-four. Can you sketch the characters, relationships, and social contexts in which you first began to name the events, people, and feelings that you felt and thought represented a particular kind of truth for you? Behind what curtain were you held captive, or just quietly resting?

Anne and I both had very loving fathers and attentive mothers, yet we felt alone. Anne said no one would believe that a girl of thirteen with thirty friends, darling parents, and a sixteen-year-old sister would see herself alone in the world. Her diary entries begin on June 14, 1942. It is not until June 20 that she begins her remaining diary entries with the salutation Dear Kitty. The rationale that leads to her beginning a diary entry as though it is a person is that she wants the diary itself to be her friend, and she will call her friend Kitty.

On July 9, Anne and her family, along with another family, went into hiding in an upper-floor attic space at her father’s place of work. They called that space the Secret Annex. Creating Kitty begins a self-conscious reflective process and the foundation of philosophical reflection. This is something more than simply chronicling events: a loading of potatoes and greens into the basement or noting encouraging BBC News broadcasts. It is the beginning of the dialectical process in which Anne feels responsible to Kitty for an honest self-disclosure and critique of herself, the people around her, her increasing isolation from the world she once knew, and her trusting/faithful relation to God.

These are some of her expressions, revelations, and dilemmas that drew me in:¹

Mummy kicked up a frightful row and told Daddy just what she thought of me . . . Finally I told daddy that I’m much more fond of him than mummy. (p.34)

I cling to daddy because it is only through him that I am able to retain the remnant of family feeling . . . I only looked at her as a mother, and she just doesn’t succeed in being that to me; I have to be my own mother. (p.40)

I must become good through my own efforts without examples and without good advice. Oh, so many things bubble up inside me as I lie in bed. That’s why in the end I always come back to my diary. That is where I start and finish, because Kitty is always patient. (p.41)

I will share more of Anne’s words with you later. Now, I want to comment on the very strong existential theme that is beginning to emerge in her writing and thinking. I found it strange in choosing her diary as a point of reference to initiate my philosophical life. I found it strange because immediately after reading her diary, I began to read the trilogy of Jean-Paul Sartre, The Roads to Freedom. Next, I