Saturday, September 18, 2004

On Family

On Family

By Piankhy

copyright 2004 Piankhy Thompson (a.k.a. Kevin Thompson)

“Family” in Integral Science

It is important to distinguish the Familial aspect of social life from what is traditionally understood as the Family. In Integral Science, the Familial simply means those individual Living Persons whom we see more or less every day, those beings with whom we are most familiar. Such a description will usually include the human members of our family of birth, at least for the First part of our lives, but it also includes all of the familiar nonhuman beings and objects that, outside of our solitary selves, constitute our most intimate social milieu. And of course this definition does not presume any necessary “blood” relationship among the human members of the “family”. In fact, it does not presume the proximity of other human beings at all, so that even persons who live alone must be understood to have a rudimentary familial relation to themselves and to their immediate environment.

The familial, properly speaking, is an inherent aspect of the Personal, and so has an implicit relationship with the Local, the Civil, the Transcendental and the Individual, since all of these venues are aspects of the field of Belonging that is Individual-Personhood. The place of the Familial within this 5-fold Identity is like the relation of, let’s say, south to the 5 directions of orientation (considering the vertical as one direction). This means that a healthy Familial situation is an aspect of a healthy Local situation (a healthy neighborhood or community), a healthy Collective/Civil situation, a healthy Psychic/Religious situation and a healthy Individual situation (See end note). Because of this paradoxical relationship/identity (one which is common to many other Integral Science conceptions) it is impossible to fully consider the familial in isolation from the rest of Individual Personhood.

Such an inherently relational and “dependant” conception of the familial is already very contrary to the common understanding of what family is in the dominant culture of Apart-ness. The Integral conception I have just outlined is not an alienated conception; it is not a denial of obvious inherent relationships and responsibilities and so it precludes the kind of dissociated factional competition between and within families, as well as between the “family” per se and, for example the “Neighborhood”, that is common in the dominant culture. From the point of view of Healthy Individual-Personal Culture, the dominant conception and experience, of “Family” is itself a Mal-familial symptom of Dyspersonal (alienated) Unhealthy Culture.

Mal-Familial Culture

I think it was Tolstoy in Anna Karennina who said, “happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way” (not an exact quote). But I partially disagree with this, since I think that there is a sense in which unhappy families too are all unhappy in essentially the same way, or at least, for essentially the same reason. Such families are unhappy because they are Alienated, Public/Private families, informed by sick culture and rather than Individual-Personal Families informed by Healthy Culture. Since culture is here defined as Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Supporting infrastructure, we can expect to find cosmologies of apart-ness, Identities of Apartness, Rituals of Apartness and an Infrastructure of Apartness all prevalent in today’s sick family as well as within each individual family member.

The shared cosmology of most families—and it is shared unconsciously if it is not shared consciously—is a cosmology of Apartness that cannot conceive of the paradoxical togetherness of difference and similarity, of self and other, of individual and group, still less of togetherness and apart-ness themselves. Not being grounded in the affirmation of such a Living Paradoxical mutuality, the family, to the extent that it is conscious of itself as such at all, will consider itself primarily in factional, alienated terms both inwardly and outwardly. What I mean is that, not only is the family ideal likely to become that of a “team”; a kind of “us” existing in implied competition with “them”, but that, inwardly, those within the family will experience themselves in an unfriendly, competitive or defeated relationship to the family itself. This is because the Identity of Family-team-member is not big enough to comprise the whole of anyone’s Individual Personhood, and implicitly requires a kind of “Loyalty” that means dissociation and neglect of neighborly, civil, transpersonal and especially Individual relationships and responsibilities, all of which will be experienced as competing with those of the family. Since the goal of the Family-team is not coming-together inwardly and outwardly--it is not an “us-and-the-world” conception, but an “us-or-the-world” conception---it correspondingly encourages a “me-or-the-family” choice that is just as dissociated and false as the “family-or-the-world” choice. The Family Cosmology of Apartness is thus immediately translated into a corresponding Identity-Politics of Apartness between the family and other groups, as well as into corresponding Identities of Apartness on the part of Individual Family-members, who experience themselves as divided in loyalty both inwardly and outwardly and forced to choose between aspects of their real, manifestly whole, Individual-Personhood under the Illusion that these aspects are primarily separate and independent.

One can speak of competition within the family as competition between family members—sibling rivalry and such things—and these are certainly apart of a malfamilial experience, but, in the following exploration of mal-familial ritual, I want to focus on this competition within the Individual-Person in such a family and on the corresponding competition between that individual-person and the family itself, in order to show how both the seeming “solidarity” of some families as well as the obvious “atomization” of others, are equally unhealthy and dysfunctional.

So what are the Mal-familial Rituals that go along with the malfamilial Cosmology and malfamilial Identity/Identification of the Family? Though such rituals are essentially rituals of Apart-ness, they can nevertheless seem to be rituals of coming together. If for example, a family religiously has dinner together every night, it might very well seem as though such a family is a “close” and healthy family. Such a rigid form of coming together is very likely to be enforced at the expense of the inner coming-together, the inner consensus, of the Family-members as Individuals. It is equally likely to be at the expense of these Individual family-members coming-together with others as neighbors, or as citizens of the world, or as Souls. In fact, if the Inner Consensus of Individuals (consensus of the Individual Mind, Heart, Body, and Intuition--or, speaking metaphorically of the Individuals Inner Family; consensus between the Inner Adult, the Inner Child, the Inner Animal, and the Inner Elder ) is not nourished and encouraged within the Family dynamic, than Individual Family-Members are likely to be unable to reach authentic inner consensus as to the aspect of there whole personhood that needs the most tending to at any moment. In the case of the example of the ritual of the family dinner, such individuals will be conflicted and resentful no matter what they do, though they might deny such a state of affairs even to themselves. And such denial is itself a ritual of inner apart-ness often involving the self-numbing effects of various kinds of anesthetic distractions, from drugs, to work-a-holism, to television.

Yet these same kinds of rituals of apartness can enable the opposite kind of Malfamilial dynamic, which is that of Neglect. The denial and neglect of Familial relationships and responsibilities; of the Familial aspect of Individual Personhood, is just as unhealthy as, if perhaps less overbearing then, its dissociated over-emphasis. Our relationship with our everyday situation and with those we see everyday exists whether we acknowledge it or not, and with that relationship exists the implied responsibility and real need of encouraging/affirming Healthy Culture in that aspect of life. Neglecting this responsibility, adolescents, preferring malfamilial team-membership to Mal-familial neglect, try to recreate a sense of belonging in gangs or sports, just as their parents might escape into the false camaraderie of factional work or Dyspersonal romance. In a relative vacuum of healthy Culture, it can be assumed that any compensation for mal-familial life will be at least as unhealthy.

And of course all of this Malfamilial culture is being enabled and reinforced by The Prevalent Material and social Infrastructure. Zoning, the Suburbs, The Isolated, detached house, the “family car” and its demands, high-rise and project apartment living, and many other circumstances reinforce the unhealthy cosmology, Identity, and rituals of the malfamilial. How to affirm a real and not effected sense of neighborliness in the suburbs for example or in an apartment with no real places other than elevators and narrow hallways in which to come-together with others or within oneself, and with no sense of mutual ownership and responsibility even to those few common places? How can one have a sense of Familial affection for a familial environment that is made of dead, artificial and alienatingly impersonal materials and made by strangers using a similarly impersonal process? How to express and live ones full individuality within a gated community? How to properly affirm, acknowledge, and honor, within the family, the rights and responsibilities inherent in our common citizenship of the world, when simply maintaining the household financially requires the daily incivility of competitive mal-employment, mal-consumption, mal-distribution and mal-production?

So there can be no healing family or household outside of a healing neighborhood and a healing larger world, nor any of these without a healing or coming-together psychologically and as Individuals. Yet the current Infra-structure makes such a coordinated coming-together feel and seem almost impossible. It even makes it almost inconceivable, because it supports the cosmological as well as ritual, inertia of the status quo.

The main point here is that, in spite of the superficially different ways unhealthy families participate in and enact the dominant unhealthy culture, whether the familial dimension of Individual-Personhood is overemphasized, as tends to be the case in the more competitive affluent families, or neglected as is often the case in poorer urban families, underlying both kind of mal-familial culture is an unconscious participation in the dominant culture of apartness inwardly and outwardly.

Healthy Familial Culture

Having outlined the some Malfamilial manifestations of Unhealthy Culture, the question arises as to what Healthy Familiality might be.

Of course Healthy Familiality (I coin this world to distinguish what I mean from “familiarity”—although this might not be useful) is Individual-Personal Familiality. It is a coming-together with other Family-members in such a way as to respect and enable both ones own and their own coming-together inwardly and outwardly (there own healthy culture) as Living Individual-Persons. Perhaps a more simple way of saying this is to say that Healthy Familiality is Living, Individual-Personal Friendship in the Familial Venue.

But what does this mean and what does it feel like in practice? Well, I intend to describe my own experiences/experiments on this score as part of the Life-Dance Log, but its possible to make deductions even in this, more theoretical essay. I propose to do this, as I have in the fore going, that is, in terms of Culture and of the Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure that make up culture.

Of Course a healthy Familial culture implies a shared cosmology of Living and paradoxical Togetherness, a cosmology that counters and constructively engages the dominant cosmology of apart-ness that is inculcated by formal as well as informal education. Healthy Culture needs healthy knowledge, it needs Integral, and not disintegral science and education.

Understanding and accepting such a Science of Togetherness is the only way Family-members will understand, accept, and be able to dance the Paradoxical Identity of Individual-Personhood. A cosmology of Togetherness is the only kind of cosmology that allows for simultaneous and complementary familial change, both inwardly and outwardly. It is the only worldview that allows a family to experience and understand itself and its members in terms that enable the dance of Individual-Personhood and that encourage an Individual-Personal World Order.

And Such a healthy cosmology and its corresponding healthy familial Identity will certainly need to be reinforced and maintained by Healthy Familial Rituals such as the Life-Dance Party and The Life Dance Union Meeting among others. These are “generic” rituals that I have described and will describe elsewhere.

And Finally, all of the above presumes at least some degree of enabling Individual-Personal infrastructure. This means a healthy structure of time and space that is suitable for ritual and in which the Gestalt of Individual-Personhood, and healthy knowledge in general, can be experienced and nourished. I believe that such infrastructure exists minimally--and so can be cultivated and nourished--even in the worst of conditions as long as there is still any kind of familial life—which means any kind of life--at all. It is a matter of taking (and making) opportunities to create more opportunities. At the same time, its also true that a really suitable infrastructure that was consciously and progressively enabling of Healthy Individual-Personal (and so Healthy Familial) culture, would involve truly fundamental social, political, and economic changes on every level of scale.

Conclusion

Despite its title, this essay is meant to be more about Healthy Culture than about the family per se. All of the Subjects treated on this and the other website are really meant to as Healthy Information pursuant of healthy culture and as parts of my own Life-Dance of Healthy Culture. Hopefully, you the reader, understand the implication that, whatever familial concerns have lead you to this essay, it is only as a whole, Individual-Person Dancing the Dance of Life in the Light of Healthy Knowledge, that you can possibly effect any kind of Familial healing and that even such gestures on your part will not be enough to fully “heal” your particular family in any dissociated sense. Indeed, in the light of healthy Knowledge it is clear that no family—and nothing else—can be healed or healthy considered in any kind of isolation. Yet, by adopting healthy culture yourself you will surely be helping to create a healing familial dynamic—however it may seem—simply because you yourself are becoming more whole and you yourself are apart of your familial environment and cant help but influence it by the example of your dance of Living Personhood and your own song of Healthy Knowledge.

Endnote:



This last aspect of Individual-Personhood (the “Individual” aspect) is less inherently “social” than the others and corresponds roughly to the relatively “vertical”, solitary, inwardly-related, rather than the relatively horizontal, outwardly-related, aspect of Individual-Personhood. Such solitude is never absolute or exclusive of relationship with others any more than active association with others excludes, even temporarily, our equally inherent aloneness. This understanding is part of the paradoxical living Togetherness—the togetherness even of Togetherness and Apart-ness--that is an essential aspect of the paradoxical identity that is Individual-Personhood as well as of Healthy Culture generally.

posted by: piankhy | 08:41 | comments (1)

comment on this experiment

Experiment entry:

I want to be clear that as a kind of Personal Politics, and so as part of the civil aspect of my own Life-Dance, these web-logs are relatively “Themless” and non-factional in intention. This means that, the reader, whoever you are, is being addressed and appealed to, primarily as an Individual-Person; that is, as an Individual Family-member, Neighbor, Citizen of the world, and Soul, with the inherent and primary relationships, rights, and responsibilities that go along with that 5-fold Identity.

Implicitly, you are being asked to recognize, and then bracket, the Public, Private, Professional, Cultural, Racial, Gendered, and even religious, familial, and national, and other Factional Identities of Apart-ness in terms of which you normally understand and express who you are as a member of the dominant culture. This is not a website for progressives or radicals or conservatives, or women or men or adults or business people or this or that race or class or creed As Such. Nor is it even for those who consider themselves primarily Individuals or primarily Family-members, or Citizens of the world, or Neighbors, or Souls, in such a way that any one of these relationships/responsibilities is understood exclude or compete with the others. It is an appeal to Everybody on the common ground of our equality as Individual-Persons, and an Invitation into of a kind of Healthy Culture in which the Paradox of this 5-fold identity and its inherent responsibilities can be understood, accepted, and danced as something that accurately reflects the paradoxical nature of Life itself, and of our lived and Living Truth.

I understand that it is possible, perhaps even, in statistical sense, inevitable, that this appeal and invitation be misunderstood, rejected, or ignored by some readers and I don’t see any way to avoid. I can only say that, at present, I feel that I have a stronger inner consensus to share in this way, what I consider to be healthy information, than to try to keep it secret or restrict my sharing of it to other media of communication. I am a cautious person by nature, and that cautiousness can sometimes turn into a paralyzing phobia. I am a discriminating person and that discrimination can some times reveal its shadow as rejection: rejection of relationship and responsibility in regard to that which I discern to be tasteless and stupid or even just less than ideal, as I tend to regard current computer culture. I am subject also to a kind of arrogance that also tends toward dissociation from, rather than conscious participation in, the world. These tendencies all suggest that positive, deliberate, and sophisticated engagement with, rather than disaffected retreat from, the collective venue is the way to go for me.

On the other hand I have a kind of Idealism that can be naïve and I have to take into consideration the extent to which this gesture is informed or motivated by such naiveté. As regards to this, I think and feel that my expectations of this step in my life-dance are really only that it help me, myself, dance the personal politics of Individual-Personhood by keeping me focused on (because I need to report on and explain) my experiments in each of its 5 venues. I do have a modest hope, but no expectation, that, partially as a result of reading these blogs, others will be willing to join me in the healthy Culture and the Dance of Life of which this experiment is apart. But I think such a modest hope is reasonable and fairly harmless.

I have also considered how certain entries, such as soul entries in the Life-dance log, might be quoted out of context and/or used against me in various ways. So far as that goes, its seems to me that some people will believe what they want to believe anyway, and that if the majority of human beings are really so inwardly/outwardly factional and confused as to fundamentally buy in to any such one-sided defamation of my, (or anyone’s) character, than there is no real hope for healthy culture and real human Life on earth anyway.

So again, on balance, I have inner consensus that making the gesture of posting these 2 blogs is part of the catalyzing of my own healing together with that of others and the world, and so is truly a part of Healthy Culture. All of this may change in the future of course as I grow and learn and get more insight into the world and myself. For now, I can only make this gesture in good faith and in the hope that you, the reader, receive it in the spirit in which it is intended.

Sincerely, Piankhy Thompson.2004

posted by: piankhy | 08:40 | comments