Integration

Presented at the ~> SB graduate institute

The intellect is much too overrated. It is such a discursive process that it often leads nowhere. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we abandon it. We still need to take time for planning and strategy..I just don’t think that it needs to take each waking moment of every day. An integrated approach to the psyche recognizes the contributions of both thoughts and feelings.

Feelings contain just as much information as thoughts and ideas. They too are cerebral events. Without the weight of feeling, we would not be able to arrive at a decision to save our life, let alone order food. Without feeling, the intellect would have difficulty deciding where to shop, let alone what to buy. Some feelings are triggered by conditions inside the body; others are evoked by conditions outside. Either way, they all register with the brain in order to be felt. The brain, in turn, redirects our perception to the body ..the same way it localizes the sound of voices in a room. Like ideas ..feelings are trying to tell us something

Feelings are not the past remnants of some primitive ancestry that need to be dismissed for the sake of intellectual attainment. The pathways that carry feeling have enormous bandwidth and widespread distribution throughout the higher centers of the brain. They inform every sensory-cortical event that takes place.

I remember a guest speaker at a graduate seminar I was attending. He was studying the gambler’s fallacy ..and observing how it applies to the population at large. He said that we do not see cause and effect relationships directly (except perhaps on the small scale of a pool table) ..instead we invent stories to explain them to ourselves. The resulting narrative is not an algorithm, it’s more like a heuristic, or ‘rule of thumb’ ..like blowing on a pair of dice before each toss.

I remember an astronomer speaking at a conference. He said that the farther out we look, the more past history we see. He wasn’t only talking about what we see through a telescope. The past history stored in memory gives resonance and meaning to what we see in the present. Since we can’t see around every corner, memory contributes to what we see when we walk down the street. Research in human perception informs us that we don’t see things the way they really are. Interpretation happens way too fast for that, and relies heavily on memory for it's information.

Many people believe that memory works like a camcorder, keeping an accurate record of events. Research, however, shows that this is a misconception. First, our memory would be pretty empty if it weren’t for the emotional-value added to events before they're allowed in. Second, recollection is a process of re-constructing events based on the value they have in the present. Without feelings, we would not have sense enough to know what’s worth storing ..nor the clues we need to re-construct what needs remembering.

One of the things I discovered early in meditation practice is how circuitous my thought processes are. They didn’t follow a ‘linear-narrative’ like I’d imagined. I also saw how much trouble I’d be in if they were the only thing I had to rely on.