Each individual is unique, and that uniqueness should be cultivated. In
Spirit and Form, author and psychologist Dr. Benjamin M. Goldberg offers a thorough analysis of individuality and its development.
Formed during thirty-five years of study, Goldberg has developed the art of psychological sculpting. His theory is that an individual should not be "changed" or "fixed," but rather the process must be like the art of sculpting stone. Spirit and Form includes a detailed analysis of how this process of articulation, as the principle of spiritual fulfillment, personal happiness, and mental health, is either cultivated or thwarted. Goldberg emphasizes the critical distinction between the psychological impact of didactic and dialectical relationships and the artificiality of the distinction between the psychological and the spiritual.
In Spirit and Form, Goldberg proposes a new model of human consciousness which revolutionizes the traditional model and obviates many of its conceptual problems. The occlusive layers of extrinsic thoughts, feelings, ambitions, and self-assessments that have peripheralized the individual are to be "chipped away," or subtracted from the equation, allowing the light of the true form or individuality to be revealed and seek its course of outward expression.
Spirit And Form
On the True Meaning of Individuality and the Art of Psychological SculptingBy Benjamin M. GoldbergiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Benjamin M. Goldberg, Ph.D.
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-5251-5Contents
Preface.......................................................xiI Alienation and Individuation................................1II Spirit and Form............................................7III Liberating the Spirit.....................................14IV Central and Peripheral Being...............................22V The Cultivation and Obscuration of Form.....................27VI Peripheral Being and Human Disorder........................39VII Consciousness and Unconsciousness.........................67VIII Psychological Sculpting..................................72IX The Spirit in the Seed.....................................88References....................................................101
Chapter One
Alienation and Individuation
A child's awe and wonder at life's simplicities carries the intimation that there is ultimately so much more, not less, to that which is the foundation or origin of these precious gifts. The finite somehow implies the Infinite, and reductionistic thinking is alien to the child's mind. Nothing is "just" this or "just" that, and the universe does not rest precariously on the head of a pin. It is grounded in Absolute Being, and the child seems to know this. The present moment is utterly replete in its splendor, and there is no thought of it being lost or diminished. The arctic wind of cynicism and negativity has yet to pierce the child's heart and mind, and she is joyously loved and sustained by all that surrounds her.
The age of innocence ends with the dawning of ego consciousness, as the child's awareness of self is gradually reduced to her physical organism and the spark of consciousness in her head. She is now but a speck of dust in an inestimably vast universe, one that she "encounters," as if the branch of a tree encounters the trunk from which it grows. The world that spawned her, that loves her as integral to itself, is divorced as the foundation of her being, and positioned in opposition to what remains of her. Far from being her very substratum, the universe is now hostile and wholly other, for in her state of nescience she cannot appreciate that as an ocean wave is a particular manifestation of the entire ocean, so it contains the entire ocean. Cosmologically speaking, she feels completely alone. Although a subjectively vivid reality, this feeling of aloneness is an illusion. As a physical being, the human organism is inextricable from that which it calls its environment. The act of breathing, for example, as the symbol and most fundamental aspect of human life, cannot be described without a description of the oxygen and carbon dioxide entering and leaving the lungs. And if we are to describe the oxygen, we must include a description of the plants and trees producing this oxygen, the soil in which they grow, the rain that fertilizes the soil, the clouds that contain the rain, and the heavens that contain the clouds. In short, to render a comprehensive scientific description of a particular organism, one must include a description of the surface tension of a bubble in the Amazon River, and the gaseous pressure of some star light-years away. Naturally, this is completely impractical, so it is agreed that the description of the human organism will end with the epidermis. The problem is not with the convention, but with the almost inevitable tendency to forget that it is a convention - to take it seriously.
As psychological beings we thus see ourselves as sparks of consciousness residing in our heads, looking out at the world around us. Yet since consciousness does not occupy space, and is therefore spaceless and sizeless, it cannot be positioned at any particular point in space. We cannot say that consciousness is any more in our heads than that it is "out there" in the field of objects, for when we speak of spacelessness, terms such as "in," "out," and "around" no longer apply. The object in my field of view is indeed in or of my consciousness, but where is my consciousness? Phenomenologically, the tree in front of my house is in front of my house, yet as the result of electromagnetic activity transforming into the neurochemical activity of the sense organs and brain, it is also a state of my brain and nervous system. Moreover, mind, to a large degree, is socially constituted. The act of thinking is fundamentally the internalization of dialectical and didactic relationships with others, and our very concept and sense of self are predominantly configured by the self-reflections from our interactions with these others. From the standpoint of the physical and social sciences, we are alone neither in the universe nor in our skins.
Coming of age with the profound anxiety of existential alienation, the individual looks to allay this dread. In some instances she avoids it, losing herself in endless stimulation and distraction. In other instances she attempts to bolster herself against it by questing for power, status, and wealth, or zealously adopting some idea, principle, symbol, or cause that is transcendent, fixed, and permanent. The transcendent and permanent object par excellence is, of course, God, and the pious seek affinity with him. Yet how does one get "closer" to God when, because of his infinite status, one can never be away from him? Only finite objects can be proximal or distal in relation to oneself, and to think that one can approach or pull away from God is to deny him his infinity and set him at a distance, as just another finite object of knowledge. The attempt to get closer to God is not only impossible and unnecessary, but reinforces the very experience of separateness that generates this need for cultivated propinquity.
What, then, is one to do? What can one do? It seems that the only option is to accept oneself as is. Ultimately, this is a profound truth, but it can be misleading if our terms are imprecise. If by "as is" we mean a current and chronic state of internal impoverishment and situational unhappiness, such acceptance would be little more than an act of passive acquiescence to substandard conditions. The very spirit of life is extinguished in this equation. If accepting oneself "as is" means acknowledging and embracing one's true nature or authentic self, we then hold the remedy for existential alienation in the form of spiritual liberation. The spiritual life, in this regard, is not man in his experience of finitude questing for infinitude, but man realizing his infinitude in the act of accepting his finitude. The very intimation of something greater than ourselves is our awareness of ourselves as the Infinite manifesting itself as the finite.
To accept one's finitude is to delve into the heart of individuality, and it is here that spirituality and psychology meet. So much has been written in the area of psychology and religion that one can easily get lost in its expansive body of terms, concepts, theories, and analogical models. In the spirit of William of Occam we seek the elegance of simplicity, to penetrate to the heart of the matter. We fear that if we do not discuss religious or spiritual ideas in supernatural terms, they will necessarily be reduced to naturalistic terms, and we will become pantheists. The general purview of spirituality must include such things as angels and spirits of the dead, afterlife and reincarnation, visions and premonitions, and doctrines and rituals. Any suggestion of affinity between the spiritual and the natural or everyday worlds is a threat to the tenability of spirituality because spirit and nature are considered opposites. Seen as such, any attempt to demystify or bring "down to earth" the spiritual element would seem to despiritualize it. If spirit and nature are not posited as opposites, as mutually exclusive — that is, if we acknowledge the nonduality that transcends them - we are less susceptible to the needless confusion arising from distinctions that are principally artifacts of the inherent dualism of language and thought. To suggest that the spiritual life lies in the acceptance of finitude or individuality, that the spiritual need not be polarized from the everyday or mundane, only reduces the spiritual to the natural if the two are opposed. If the Infinite ultimately transcends all dualisms while also embracing them, to speak of the spiritual in mundane terms is not to reduce the spiritual but to ennoble the mundane. The spiritual can only be reduced to the natural if the natural is already reduced, which is the inevitable result of creating this schism in the first place. Reductionism strikes hard when the natural or mundane is devalued as "just" this or "simply" that, ignoring that as a manifestation of the Infinite, the inherent nature of finitude could never be spiritually bereft. Awed by the very fact of existence, the young child and the spiritually aware adult can appreciate the profundity of a sunset or budding flower without invoking exclusively religious or spiritual constructs. Spirit and nature are not split asunder, and the divine is not hopelessly sought in another place and time, as if the manifest universe were no more than some insipid epiphenomenon.
Permeating psychological, anthropological, and biophysical thought is the rudimentary assumption that man is essentially alone, a sentient mass of flesh in an otherwise cold and mechanistic universe, and a creature of consciousness encapsulated in his own skull. This principle and experience of existential alienation engenders profound terror, for in our experience of ourselves as fragmented or splintered from the greater whole we become inconsequential, and our lives are seen to have no real meaning. Our existence is no more significant than had we never existed at all. There are many who believe that we should accept this principle and experience axiomatically, for any thought to the contrary is merely an attempt to escape the inescapable reality of our ultimate aloneness (Heidegger 1927; Husserl 1913; Kierkegaard 1846; Sartre 1943). Others view this experience as illusory, and view thought to the contrary not as escapism, but as a movement to render the illusion transparent (Suzuki 1949, 1956; Watts 1948, 1957).
The dawning of ego consciousness is a normal developmental phase in the evolution of individual consciousness. In the earlier stages of ontogenesis the wondrous object world is the wholly predominant reality. There are only vague intimations of the reality of the knowing Subject or conscious Self, for it is completely lost or absorbed in the experience of the object. The experience of subjectivity is introduced with the consciousness of ego. As ontogenesis proceeds there are developments in cognitive, psychosocial, and biological functioning that draw a considerable amount of conscious attention to the psychophysical organism. Physical changes and surging hormones throw the biological organism into stark relief. As language enters into social discourse the individual becomes a social object with a reflected concept of herself, typically constituted by the adjectives and labels that are assigned to her. With the increasing capacity to grasp higher-order categorical abstractions, further attention is drawn to one's self-concept and identity as it is intricately woven into the fabric of social nomenclature and meaning. While navigating the world of adult human interaction and its politics, considerable attention must be focused on one's persona or social face, and on the act of impression management necessary for this presentation of self. With this massive attentional consumption by the ego or psychophysical organism, there are still only vague intimations of the knowing Subject or conscious Self, for it is lost in the ego experience, which is a particular aspect of the general object experience. It is this state of mind that we refer to as ego consciousness, and true subjectivity is still a nonexperience. Yet since the ego experience is more proximal, compelling, and vivid than the remainder of the object field, it is designated and experienced as oneself, the true identity, or the subject of all that is known and experienced.
Disconcerting only because of its unfamiliarity, a moment's reflection reveals that the ego or psychophysical organism is actually not the subject of experience, but a circumscribed, more central and proximal portion of the object field in which the conscious Self gets lost or absorbed. The phenomenology of the psychophysical organism, the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, sensations, memories, and anticipations, are all objects of knowledge; the truly subjective side of experience defies description, and is the cornerstone of religion, spirituality, mysticism, and metaphysics. The knowing Subject, or conscious Self, in other words, is a transcendent entity, but no less "oneself" because of its transcendence. In fact, it is the Self, the foundation of knowledge and reality, the very ground of being.
To speak of ego consciousness as a developmental phase in the evolution of consciousness implies the ultimate "awakening" of the Self to its own nature, as distinct, though inseparable, from the field of ego and non-ego object experience. If the Self is "oneself" ultimately, its transcendence renders any attempt to distinguish the psychological from the spiritual as theoretically inelegant and redundant. It is a grave error and misunderstanding of Eastern philosophies to suggest that the ego or psychophysical organism is in some way an unreality or illusion. It is nihilism that takes the ego experience, and the general object experience, and invalidates them ontologically. The illusion is the experience that the psychophysical organism is the center of being, or ultimately "oneself," and this illusion is created when the knowing Subject or conscious Self is absorbed in, or identified with, the ego experience. When reference is made to the "ego illusion," this is not to say that the illusion is the ego itself, but rather the experience of being ontologically limited and bound by it. To render the ego illusion transparent is not to negate the ego, but to know it as an object of knowledge like all objects of knowledge, as distinct from the knowing Subject or conscious Self. Conscious of itself, the Self continues to know the object world but no longer identifies with it, and in this awakening it realizes its essential transcendence and infinitude. The illusory nature of ego consciousness and the impression of aloneness are revealed, and any foundation for the meaninglessness and futility of existential anxiety is undermined.
To say that the awakened Self consciously knows the world of finite objects is to say that it loves those objects for their very finitude. The movement of the transcendent Self or Spirit is to delve into the heart of individuality, and in this movement is found spiritual liberation and the spiritual life. We shall see that the answer to the problem of existential alienation and spiritual impoverishment is the process of individuation, or the articulation and development of personality, for in this mundane movement of human psychology is the perfect exemplification of the formative Logos, or the Infinite Spirit manifesting itself in finite form.
Chapter Two
Spirit and Form
We begin with the reality of everyday life, the world of finite objects, or the world that is known and can be known. If words are to do it any justice, only indefinite variability and unceasing movement can even begin to approximate its richness. It is a world of colors and shapes, textures and sounds, feelings and ideas. It ranges aesthetically from exquisite beauty to horrific ugliness, and is forever in a state of flux.
Among their myriad qualities, finite objects of knowledge may be distal or proximal. The mountains on the horizon, for example, are clearly farther away than the chair in which I am sitting, whereas the sensations in my body and the thoughts in my head are clearly nearer. Yet when we speak of distal and proximal we must have a point of reference, for these are strictly relative concepts. We must ask, "Distal and proximal in relation to what?" The answer will be, "in relation to me, of course," but we must be more specific. If by me I mean my physical body, I can certainly say that the mountains are distant and the chair is near. But it must be remembered that my body, either as internal sensations or as a visual percept, is also a finite object of knowledge that is near – nearer, in fact, than the chair. What, then, is the me in relation to which distal and proximal make sense? I can say that perhaps it is my very thoughts and feelings, and again I must be reminded that thoughts and feelings are finite objects of knowledge as well. They are strikingly nearer than the mountains, but remain finite objects. It seems that in my attempt to define myself I consistently discern known objects. What, then, is the me that stands in relation to these objects, that knows these objects?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Spirit And Formby Benjamin M. Goldberg Copyright © 2010 by Benjamin M. Goldberg, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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