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Psychological Reductionism as Representation of Spiritual Traditions.

  
 
Unconditional Love
13:53 / 01.03.06
PSYCHOLOGICAL REDUCTIONISM
The process of reducing all social activity and behaviour to the psychological characteristics of the human actors involved. Such reduction eliminates the possibility of sociology since it denies that there is anything greater than the individual. Society is simply an aggregation of individuals. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) argued against this in his study of suicide by arguing, and demonstrating, that even after providing a psychological explanation for individual acts of suicide there was something still to account for: the difference in suicide rates between societies. This he showed was derived from characteristics of the society and could be not explained as dependent on individual psychological characteristics.

The above taken from an online sociological dictionary.

Reductionism in philosophy describes a number of related, contentious theories that hold, very roughly, that the nature of complex things can always be reduced to (be explained by) simpler or more fundamental things. This is said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings.

Roughly this means that chemistry is based on physics, biology is based on chemistry, psychology and sociology are based on biology. The first of these are commonly accepted but the last step is controversial and therefore the frontier of reductionism: evolutionary -psychology and -sociology vs. those who claim people have a soul or another quality that separates them from the material world. Reductionists believe that the behavioral-sciences should become a genuine scientific discipline by being based on genetic biology.

The above taken from wikipedia.

Holism (from ολoς, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total) is the idea that all the properties of a given system (biological, chemical, social, mental, linguistic, etc) cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its component parts alone. According to holism, in other words, it is the system as a whole which possesses an ontological or epistemological privilege with respect to the parts that make it up.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Jan Smuts defined holism as "The tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution."

Holism is sometimes described as the opposite of reductionism (see also scientific reductionism), although proponents of reductionism state that holism is better regarded as the opposite of greedy reductionism. It may also be contrasted with atomism.

The above taken from wikipedia.

I am currently reading a book called the physics of angels by rupert sheldrake and matthew fox, the narrative is written as a commentary between the two authors on various teachings as given by three church writers on angels, the relationship built up in the work fuses the ideas of creation spirituality (not just christian) with sheldrakes scientific ideas.

One of the ideas that comes forward from the book and other areas i have been exploring is the damaging effect that a purely psychological reductionist approach to human life and spirituality can have. To posit that spirituality is in some way just an expression of human consciousness and that in some sense, is the base factor of all spiritual experience, is an approach that denys the 'other' as being anything but a product of human consciousness.

It posits that essentially their is a self at the heart of all psychological phenomena, and that this lone individual is the producer of all mental phenomena and values, including spiritual experience.

As somebody that experiences contact and communication with presences and entities, i find this view point very narrow and very limiting as a way to encounter my own experiences.

I wonder what others opinions are.
 
 
Quantum
10:43 / 02.03.06
My opinion is that the Headshop might give you more of a response. I don't think many here subscribe to the reductionist psychological world view (although I lean toward it occasionally).
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
11:30 / 02.03.06
As somebody that experiences contact and communication with presences and entities, i find this view point very narrow and very limiting as a way to encounter my own experiences.

I agree with that assessment. However, I have to ask: Who is dictating the way in which we process these experiences? I see a lot of anti-psychiatry feeling in magical discourse, implied or explicit. "Of course, if I were to tell a medical professional about my conversations with Bast/the time I saw my dead grandfather/my spirit guide named Ralph, the MEN IN WHITE COATS would be sent for and I would be FORCED to take EVIL TOXIC DRUGS FOREVER!"

It may be that my case is anomalous, but in actual fact I did once tell a psychiatrist (in the course of a professional consultation) that I had seen ghosts and heard voices speaking to me. She was running through some kind of checklist, asked me if I'd ever experienced these things, and I answered honestly. No bells sounded, no lights flashed, no Men In White Coats rappelled down from the ceiling to bundle me into a van and drive me off. She just made a couple of notes. Nobody ever even asked me about it again.

A diagnosis of mental illness rests on more than the phenomena associated with spirit contact. Other factors, such as the individual's level of self-care, ability to maintain employment, ability to maintain normal relationships with others, ect., should be and generally are taken into consideration.

I can't speak for others but the people in my own life who've been the most 'reductive' and dismissive of my experiences, the people who've flat-out told me "it's all in your head, you're not communicating with anything, you're just sick and you should do XYZ to get better" have all been other magicians or practitioners of alternative spirituality.

In the end, I think we all have to process this stuff in the way that works best for us, which fits the facts as we observe them, and just accept that others may have a different interpretation.
 
 
LVX23
17:34 / 02.03.06
Reductionsim cannot account for emergence or free will. So why then should it presume to account for something so complex as human psychology? Certainly biological and chemical factors influence cognition and behavior but, so far, in a science that has completely failed to grasp the fundamental processes of how mind arises from physiology, there is no authority to back up the suggestion that psychology itself can be reduced to purely mechanical factors.

I would tend to say that this sort of understanding lies outside the realm of rationalism completely. I mean, think of someone you know very well. Then consider how their moods and behavior change from day to day, hour to hour. There's maybe a steady baseline that their personality oscillates around but those oscillations likely fail to demonstrate any real predictable pattern. Human behavior - even for relatively dry and stable people - is exceedingly complex and dynamic. My concern is that in continually trying to define and predict human behavior, we will force it into a neat little gray box and essentially program out all of the fun and chaos. That feeling of "love"? Just a lot of dopamine. Oh, you think you felt God in that sunset? Probaly just theta waves and serotonin. To quote Lisa Simpson, "We're the MTV Generation - we feel neither highs nor lows".

If you then add ideas like myth, ancestry, memory, associative emotions, childhood experience, peak experiences, visions, etc... you'll be very hard-pressed indeed to come up with anything more than a rough sketch of these so-called aberrant behaviors and how they may be informed by biochemistry. We know that increases in the amount of serotonin, for example, can induce hallucinations. But the content of a given individual's hallucinations cannot be predicted or mapped. The same would apply to other forms of trance and gnosis. There may be similarities in neurochemistry and brain waves from one person to the next but the actual content and it's subjective experience will always vary and will always be uniqe to that individual.

I think we can make some general statements about the brain states common to trance, gnosis, vision, and ritual, but we cannot, and will never be able to, find more than cursory commonalities between individual experiences of these states. Maybe, if at some point we understand how chemistry gives rise to mind, and if we can understand how I can go from stillness to typing just by the impetus of will, then perhaps we could start discussing if inner visions might have a purely mechanistic foundation.

But again, I don't think we'll ever quite get to that level of rational understanding. These things tend to slough off words and formula and remain in the realm of pure experience. In other words, I don't believe that there's a formula to explain my personal interface with teh godhead.
 
 
Ganesh
03:34 / 03.03.06
It posits that essentially their is a self at the heart of all psychological phenomena, and that this lone individual is the producer of all mental phenomena and values, including spiritual experience.

As somebody that experiences contact and communication with presences and entities, i find this view point very narrow and very limiting as a way to encounter my own experiences.

Okay, so you find a particular psychology-based viewpoint limiting. As Mordant says, though, how is it actually limiting your own belief system? Is someone forcing you to adopt this viewpoint, or is its mere existence a burden? I'm unsure whether the point you're advancing is being applied to the 'reductionism' underpinning psychological theory or to flesh-and-blood psychiatry, as per Mordant's example.
 
 
Ganesh
03:53 / 03.03.06
To posit that spirituality is in some way just an expression of human consciousness and that in some sense, is the base factor of all spiritual experience, is an approach that denys the 'other' as being anything but a product of human consciousness.

Is that necessarily a Bad Thing, though? To me, locating spirituality in human consciousness doesn't diminish it at all: on the contrary, it makes human consciousness a wonderful, mysterious font of joy. "Human consciousness" need not automatically imply mundanity or awe-sucking solipsism; in inserting the word "just" to your sentence, you are greatly undervaluing something I'd consider wholly as 'holy' (ho ho) as any number of externalised 'godheads'.
 
 
Unconditional Love
18:33 / 04.03.06
My main problem with psychological reductionism is that it denies communication with spirits, gods etc as external entities to consciousness. When applied in a strict and puritanical fashion it shows a need to reduce everything to a form in or perception of human consciousness.

It can be seen as a denial of external spiritual presences.
 
 
LVX23
03:19 / 05.03.06
I feel that everything is both an expression of human consciousness and universal consciousness. Deities, spirits, thoughtforms, etc all exist along the gradient between these two poles.
 
 
Ganesh
10:25 / 05.03.06
My main problem with psychological reductionism is that it denies communication with spirits, gods etc as external entities to consciousness. When applied in a strict and puritanical fashion it shows a need to reduce everything to a form in or perception of human consciousness.

It can be seen as a denial of external spiritual presences.

So? Is someone applying this in a strict and puritanical fashion to you?

I guess it depends, to an extent, on one's idea of "external", and how important it is to one that entities have an external reality outwith one's own consciousness. I don't see this as especially important: if I were interacting with a spirit or godform or whatever, I don't think I'd be too bothered about establishing its existence in external reality. I'd be interested to know whether other posters feel differently - and, if this is a crucial distinction, how they go about establishing it.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
11:01 / 05.03.06
I'd argue that it does matter, at least to me. I don't much care if anyone else thinks the beings I talk to are really-real, but it's important to me. I don't like to think that I spend an appreciable amount of time talking to a grownup version of a child's imaginary friends.
 
 
Ganesh
12:51 / 05.03.06
How do you go about establish their 'realness', Mordant?
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
13:57 / 05.03.06
You carry on acting as if they're real, even though you may feel utterly batshit. Eventually something weird happens, such that you cannot explain it in any rational way. Then you go on about your business feeling marginally better for a couple of weeks, after which time you begin to question whether the weird thing that happened was as weird as you remember it. Eventually you either reach a sort of critical weirdness mass and are able to get on without much external prompting, or you get fucked off with the whole thing.
 
 
Unconditional Love
14:48 / 05.03.06
I think the person applying the psychological reductionism to my practice, is in fact myself. I think i need to examine the drawbacks to such an approach and the value of other approaches, with which i have worked with, but also found led me to have some problems. What i would like to get away from the idea of is that i am playing complex head games with myself that are reinforced by coincidences that occur in my life.

For example last night i had quiet a lenghty conversation with a very charismatic presence, in the space of my own mind. The voice spoke of helping me in a certain fashion and we struck a deal of sorts.

Now i explained this today as me talking to an archetypal level of my own (un)consciousness, or as an internal voice constructed from a variety of media and impressions that i have taken onboard from the culture that surrounds me.

But at the time of the experience it had a very different context in my body and mind. A conniving, sly, illuminated, energetic presence, very gentlemen like and such profound charisma. Spoke to me with such praise and charm, said he had been waiting for me to communicate for so long. It was a very real tangible physical and mental feeling, that saw me elated enough to stop me from sleeping well, and has kept me elated for most of today so far.

So the difference becomes in how i process the experience to the actual reality of the experience as i have it, If this entity leaves me, or takes its field of influence away from me, i will physically feel the difference in mood, bodily feeling and internal voices (conscious state).

So at some level it almost feels like escapism to pass it off as a purely psychological phenomena. Just as i know the presence of different environments and people effect my sense of self, so do the presences of spiritual beings effect my sense of self in a tangible physical way. I can also witness effects upon my environment in what appear as coincidences or right time right place right face moments.

My own personal problem with psychological reductionism then becomes, that a focus of purely organising my own spiritual experience in this way denies the full reality of my own spiritual experience.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
14:58 / 05.03.06
So, you stop applying it. Take a different approach for a while. Act As If.

To me, it looks as if you're arguing not with external figures but with a voice inside your own head, the internalised critic who tells you you're nuts, that your experiences are worthless ect. I know, I've got one too.
 
 
Unconditional Love
11:20 / 06.03.06
The internalised critic, i agree. I think this critic is reinforced by various parts of my education, perhaps some social institutions and certain people i know.
Perhaps an angle to work on is deconditioning this internal critic, or turning it on itself til it criticises itself into oblivion.

Although i find the philosophy of this critic useful, i think thats because the cutural conditions i live within reinforce that usefulness through interaction with others who have been likewise educated with certain beliefs in there learning.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
12:21 / 06.03.06
I think that having an internal sceptic can actually be useful. You're less likely to succumb to the trap of solipsism, magic as a security blanket, if you have this little voice inside you that pipes up once in a while to scream "What are you doing? Are you nuts?" you're less likely to engage in dangerous practices, or life-eating projects that never go anywhere, or to sell your house and donate the money to the Radiant Order of the Gilded Swizzlestick, ect. Interrogating your practice from its perspective is often healthy--you can see ways in which you could adjust your practice to achieve the same ends but in a way that ends up benefitting other aspects of your life.

I'll admit that this critic can become a toxic influence. Mine gets pretty damn loud at times and can drown out everything else; I do seem spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy wrasslin with the little bastard. But even when this happens, it's still important to recognise that the nagging, criticsing voice is coming from within, not without. Sure, it may have been created by experiences in one's formative years, but projecting the voice outward onto a group or individual ("Those psychiatrists all think..." "My doctor would say...") is not only unfair to the other party but dangerous for oneself.

You can end up trapping yourself in a narrative which perpetuates the negative experiences that created the Critic in the first place; even though nobody's actually telling you you're crazy, you still feel exactly as if they were. You're still forced into a curled-up, embattled, seige mentality which is as exhausting to maintain as it is to engage with.
 
 
Unconditional Love
13:30 / 07.03.06
You may well of described some of my psychology in a nutshell there 'seige mentality' , and points taken about the usefulness of the critic. I dont know how common this is but i actually thrive on conflict if that wasnt apparent enough by my behaviour at some points on this board, my life seems dull without an enemy imagined or otherwise.

Also the comments about projection of internal emotions onto outside percieved forces are also welcome as a reminder to pay more attention to that side of things, which is an easy space to enter into.

I dont actually want the thread to turn into psychiatry/psychotherapy bashing thats far to easy, i wouldnt mind seeing thou discourse around the humanistic and psychological relationship to spirituality and how those attitudes have and are creating real world effects and perception, i dont want to be too harsh on secular humanism and its attendent philosophies and economics because it is as a culture so young in many respects, but i dont want to think that it may well become as a destructive force to unorthodox/ less regarded spiritualities as many orthodox religions did in the past.
 
 
Fell
16:43 / 07.03.06
Just quick note, but on this topic, this is a great resource site:

Ego Death and Self-Control Cybernetics
 
 
Unconditional Love
13:32 / 14.03.06
I am beginning to suspect that my jungian shadow is a humanist intellectual rationalist who loves to psychologically reduce things. I am beginning to think my shadow is a bright white light.

All these years spent being irrational, chaotic and poetic may actually of payed off.
 
  
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