[from Jason Gosnell 4.22.08 8:26 CDT}]
I am responding to Bill's first post which I lost track of...I may have
misperceived the part on koans, but thought I would add: Koans are not
non-sensical. I don't know if you said it that way, but I always gather
that when people mention them. To the mind, they are fun non-sensical
things. But, actually they are very direct pointings to the inner
stillness/essence. "What was your face before your parents were born?"
is one. If you sit with that for a time, it will reveal something. They
are all of the same root which is why many Zen masters just sit instead
of use koans. Either way seems to work. And, I am a novice still, not a
Zen master.
In PCT terms, it is a support for your re-organization overall to know
that your innermost sense of self is stillness...emptiness. This
gradually causes all of your perceptions to be impacted. Instead of
looking for perfection in forms, a very basic misperception, you become
more balanced knowing it is deep within. This diminishes the search for
peace/joy in temporary forms...that is, gaining total satisfaction in
particular perceptions. You take the world of form less seriously. Also,
you see it's nature better in general.
Other pointers that help are ...all things are temporary...all forms are
emptiness appearing as a temporary form...and practice active
participation in loss. There are endless pointers to the same root as
emptiness or stillness or vastness...etc. G-O-D is another word, but
that tends to form an object in the mind...so, bad pointer if you ask
me.
Ask me about this when I am losing something though. ; ) Still, it's
true.
Regards, Jason
ยทยทยท
-----Original Message-----
From: Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet)
[mailto:CSGNET@LISTSERV.UIUC.EDU] On Behalf Of Bill Powers
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2008 5:08 AM
To: CSGNET@LISTSERV.UIUC.EDU
Subject: Re: MOL PCT Therapists/Counselors/Life Coaches
[From Bill Powers (2008.04.22.0232 MDT)]
Keith Daniels (2008.04.21.1951 PDT) --
Just to clarify. I wasn't offended by anything you said. ... I'd
love a straightforward, non-metaphorical translation but those are
exceedingly rare.
Good. I was hoping for the same things but also failed to find them.
But this is all good for me because I listen to what I'm saying and
realize that most of it's irrelevant. Religion, like many other
things people turn to, is a form of psychotherapy because it
addresses mainly psychological problems of being human and living
together. I shouldn't speak against something that people find
helpful, that makes them feel better. The question is not what
behaviors they produce to get help, but just what it is they need help
with.
In religions of the West, what they need help with is cast mostly in
the form of "sins." We do, and want to do, things we know we should
not do. We fall into despair, depression, self-loathing,
helplessness, confusion. We know our duties and can't bring ourselves
to carry them out. We are consumed with hatred even toward those we
want to love. We find ourselves aspiring to the highest ideals while
seeking the vilest self-indulgences and self-destruction.
In the East, I expect that it's much the same, except that the
emphasis is more on seeking the good rather than avoiding the evil.
That still amounts to taking one side of a conflict and trying to
suppress the other. And the head-on approach doesn't work any better
over there than it does over here (though meditation is much less
coercive than threats of Hell or promises of Heaven).
Yet despite the general failures to address the real issues clearly
and directly, as with most other forms of psychotherapy there is a
substantial success rate -- various estimates say about 30% of people
get better no matter what form of therapy they accept, including
none. That sounds like a reasonable estimate for the religious forms,
too. Everyone has the capacity to reorganize; it's bound to work some
of the time.
And we mustn't forget the 70% who stick with whatever form of therapy
they have chosen (including none) even if it's not doing much for
them. They are still hoping that it will work with a little more
persistence. And there's also the group who, still looking for
something that will fix what's wrong, thumb through the Yellow Pages
hoping to come across the particular variant of this or that approach
-- or pill -- that will finally do it for them.
None of these groups of people take it kindly when someone tells them
the method they're relying on for salvation is hogwash. They don't
want to hear the Buddha's last words: Seek out your own salvation
with diligence. They're still sure that someone else can give it to
them. Well, someone else can, I think, but not in the way that most
people expect.
The method of levels expresses what I think that way is. Because of
the way we're constructed (I think), we can act very skillfully to
make multiple experiences become the way we want them to be, all at
the same time. But that same ability has what Tim Carey calls an
Achilles' Heel. Since more than one control system can be active at
the same time, and because we do not arrive in the world fully
equipped to handle everything, but must learn how to control, it is
possible for control systems inside the same person to come into
conflict with each other. We want one thing for one set of reasons,
and another thing for a different set of reasons, and then we find
that getting either one means we can't have the other. Being made of
control systems that are very sensitive to small errors and very good
at correcting them, we then find that we are locked in a desperate
struggle with ourselves which manifests itself as paralysis of the
will. If this doesn't result in an immediate reorganization that
changes the opposing systems in some fundamental way, we are stuck.
The best we can do is for other control systems in us to throw their
weight into the conflict and try to unbalance the conflict enough in
one direction or the other to permit at least some crippled form of
action, or simply avoid altogether the situations that require the
use of either of the conflicted systems. That can be a pretty severe
limitation.
What the method of levels does is to point reorganization toward the
control systems that are causing the problems instead of toward the
symptoms, the consequences of having the problems. The mobility of
awareness, which I learned about first through reading the literature
of the East, is the key to the puzzle. We can move attention around
inside the hierarchy of control, and when we do, apparently we also
move the locus of reorganization (or at least the most intense focus
of reorganization). So if someone is hung up on the effects of a
conflict, such as an apparent inability to step outside one's front
door, it is possible for awareness to be enticed away from that
problem to the conflict that is causing it: wanting to leave the
house, and at the same time, equally strongly but for different
reasons, not wanting to leave the house. Each side is the result of a
different higher-order control process (obviously not working very
well at the moment), and it is those processes that need attention,
not the lower-level processes where the inability to act is felt.
Reorganizing the lower-level processes is not going to remove the
conflict.
Just how one entices awareness toward the source of the problem
remains to be worked out in more detail, but apparently verbal
communication can help a great deal. Simply by mentioning things, can
can call other people's attention to them. We may not know exactly
what the other person is now attending to, but it's probably
different from what was in attention before. And through interaction
we can reach a pretty good, or at least sufficient, understanding and
go on from there. The person's own distress has turned reorganization
on; now the problem is to direct the reorganization where it will
improve matters instead of just trading one problem for another just
like it.
What is of the most help is to listen for hints from the person who
needs help. The hints come in the form of disruptions of the flow of
conversation, comments or actions that are not on topic but are about
the person or the process. Those, I think, are effects of
higher-order systems, and hints that can lead awareness to them. This
requires alert self-examination by the helpee, and equally alert
sensitivity on the part of the guide to those hints from higher
systems. This cooperation of alertnesses is what distinguishes the
MOL from other approaches -- that, and all the other things that
other approaches do that are simply omitted from the method of
levels, such as analysis, diagnosis, and treatment.
I think all successful therapies, including religions, accomplish the
same objectives we try for in MOL. People also do it by themselves,
sometimes, with no help, because of course it's their own capacity to
reorganize that makes it work.
As to your experience of the Buddhist service in LA in
1946, I would have loved to have been there. I know a bit about the
history
of Buddhism in America and my understanding is that there were few
non-Japanese or non-Chinese Buddhist services at that time. So I would
have
loved to have known exactly what it was you came across.
Well, I would too, but that was over 60 years ago. Any memory that
old is pretty suspect. I just don't recall whether the congregation
was Oriental or paleface, now that you mention it. Maybe I was
focusing more on getting some answers to problems that troubled me a
lot. One of them was that I was now going to go to college to become
a physicist, and physicists, the year before, had come to my rescue
as I waited on Treasure Island to join the invasion of Japan, where
my job was to have been the planting of radio beacons on the beaches
prior to the assault. The physicists saved my neck by dropping two
atomic bombs on Japan, thereby tainting the profession I loved and
creating a huge conflict. Maybe I went to that church to say I was
sorry. Or maybe that's what I wish was the reason.
Don't worry about not being reverent about PCT. Just be accurate.
Best,
Bill P.