Last Sunday the “Kunst im Labor – Der Kunstmarkt mit dem besten Künstlergemisch” took place. Great organization, a fitting location in the city of Zurich, and most of all fascinating artists and visitors. I really enjoyed it to be in the midst of creatives, and creators, to discuss, to philosophize. Instead of mechanical likes, people with their verbal and non-verbal reactions. Sold art books physically, not just online, signed by hand for real people. The event left me with lasting impressions and contacts; wonderful. An artist in the wild; where else, when the connection to nature, in general, is so important.
I am already looking forward to the next of the monthly planned exhibitions; then as a visitor. For those who would also like to participate, I can only recommend it.
Organizer:
https://www.kunstimlabor.ch/
https://www.janabenninger.ch/
Photos: Patrick Sorrilha (Instagram: (@reinka_photography) and Larissa Ernst
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Rückblick auf ‘Kunst im Labor’, Zürich 2022-10
Letzten Sonntag hat die “Kunst im Labor – Der Kunstmarkt mit dem besten Künstlergemisch” stattgefunden. Toll organisiert, passende Location in der Stadt Zürich, und vor allem faszinierende Künstler und Besucher. Ich habe es so richtig genossen, inmitten von Kreativen, Kreierenden sein zu dürfen, zu diskutieren, zu philosophieren. Statt mechanische Likes, Menschen mit ihren verbalen und non-verbalen Reaktionen. V.a. Kunstbücher physisch, nicht nur online verkauft, von Hand signiert für echte Menschen. Der Anlass hat für mich bleibende Eindrücke und Kontakte hinterlassen. Ein Künstler in freier Wildbahn; wo sonst, wenn doch die Verbindung zur Natur generell so wichtig ist.
Ich freue mich bereits jetzt auf die nächste der monatlich geplanten Ausstellungen; dann auch als Besucher. Für jene, die ebenfalls mitmachen möchten, kann ich dies nur empfehlen.
Organisatorin Kunst im Labor:
https://www.kunstimlabor.ch/
https://www.janabenninger.ch/
Fotos: Patrick Sorrilha (Instagram: (@reinka_fotografie) und Larissa Ernst
(I do not expect this text to be (easily) accessible to people, especially to who have not read previous texts on Awareness Intelligence. It is also not posted for likes. It is part of my practice and a gift to publish it without oversimplification anyway.)
Changes in a person’s life situation can rearrange one’s mental socio-temporal schema in such a way that new coherences emerge. One may coherently consider the self in the whole range of time to create temporal coherence. Or, one may add the intra-personal to the already prioritized inter- and extra-personal in the present to attain social coherence. Thereupon, a person may become enabled to follow coherently through on the chosen/valued temporal or social focus, which might represent a form of versatility and agency. Indeed, agency can be understood as the deliberative, reflective activity of a human being in framing, choosing, and executing their action toward a valued goal in a way that is not fully determined by factors and conditions other than their own understanding and reasoning.
Creating more coherence and, therefore, also more agency might be a learnable capacity. For instance, perceived self-efficacy develops through changing one’s patterns of thinking, which could be of the like of, for example, the above-illustrated changes in one’s socio-temporal mental schema.
All possible types (i.e., temporal and social) and sub-types of coherences (i.e., on all three respective levels of each of the temporal and social dimensions) could be observed in the schemas generated by the studies in Awareness Intelligence. Also, the research shows that temporal coherence may be a precondition for social coherence as the latter only existed together with its temporal occurrence: social coherence did not exist in isolation. In any case, both social and temporal structures are crucial for mentally modeling the world and for becoming a temporally integrated and socially whole agent in life.
Wisdom could be defined as the consequence of applying intelligence for the benefit of the broader good that is attained through adaptation to pre-existing, interaction with current, and creation of new surroundings, all in the sense of equilibrating limited and expanded time. Applied to a socio-temporal worldview as presented for the first time in the studies of Awareness Intelligence, these elements of wisdom would be temporal coherence through learning from the past, interacting with the present in a socially balanced way, and solving problems to creating a future for all. Further, wisdom emerges from balancing intra-, inter-, and extra-personal awareness and engagement. In terms of the socio-temporal framework, this stresses the benefit of social coherences. In that sense, the ability to reflect on and mentally cover the whole socio-temporal scope of the world makes Awareness Intelligence.
WIE SOZIO-TEMPORALE KOHÄRENZ HANDLUNGSFÄHIGKEIT UND WEISHEIT BILDET
(Ich erwarte nicht, dass dieser Text (leicht) für Leute zugänglich ist, spezielle nicht für diejenigen, die keine früheren Texte über Bewusstseinsintelligenz gelesen haben. Er wird auch nicht für Likes gepostet. Es ist Teil meiner Praxis und des Geschenks, ihn sowieso ohne Vereinfachung zu veröffentlichen.)
Veränderungen in der Lebenssituation einer Person können das mentale sozio-zeitliche Schema so umordnen, dass neue Zusammenhänge entstehen. Man kann das Selbst im gesamten Zeitbereich kohärent betrachten, um zeitliche Kohärenz zu schaffen. Oder man kann das Intrapersonale dem bereits priorisierten Inter- und Extrapersonalen in der Gegenwart hinzufügen, um soziale Kohärenz zu erreichen. Daraufhin kann eine Person in die Lage versetzt werden, den gewählten/bewerteten zeitlichen oder sozialen Fokus kohärent zu verfolgen, was eine Form von Vielseitigkeit und Handlungsfähigkeit darstellen kann. In der Tat kann Handlungsfähigkeit als die abwägende, reflexive Aktivität eines Menschen verstanden werden, der sein Handeln in Richtung eines geschätzten Ziels in einer Weise gestaltet, wählt und ausführt, die nicht vollständig von anderen Faktoren und Bedingungen als seinem eigenen Verständnis und Denken bestimmt wird.
Mehr Kohärenz und damit auch mehr Handlungsfähigkeit zu schaffen, scheint eine erlernbare Fähigkeit zu sein. Zum Beispiel entwickelt sich wahrgenommene Selbstwirksamkeit durch die Veränderung der eigenen Denkmuster, die beispielsweise den oben dargestellten Veränderungen des sozio-zeitlichen mentalen Schemas ähnlich sein können.
Alle möglichen Typen (d. h. zeitliche und soziale) und Unterarten von Kohärenz (d. h. auf allen drei jeweiligen Ebenen jeder der zeitlichen und sozialen Dimensionen) konnten in den Schemata beobachtet werden, die durch die Studien in Bewusstseinsintelligenz generiert wurden. Die Forschung zeigt auch, dass zeitliche Kohärenz eine Voraussetzung für soziale Kohärenz sein kann, da letztere nur zusammen mit ihrem zeitlichen Auftreten existierte: soziale Kohärenz existierte nicht isoliert. In jedem Fall sind sowohl soziale als auch zeitliche Strukturen entscheidend, um die Welt mental zu modellieren und ein zeitlich integrierter und sozial ganzer Akteur im Leben zu werden.
Weisheit könnte als die Folge der Anwendung von Intelligenz zum Wohle des Allgemeinwohls definiert werden, die durch Anpassung an bereits vorhandene, Interaktion mit der aktuellen und Schaffung neuer Umgebungen im Sinne eines Ausgleichs von begrenzter und erweiterter Zeit erreicht wird. Angewandt auf eine sozio-temporale Weltsicht, wie sie in den Studien in Bewusstseinsintelligenz ein erstes Mal vorgestellt wird, wären diese Elemente der Weisheit zeitliche Kohärenz durch Lernen aus der Vergangenheit, Interaktion mit der Gegenwart in einer sozial ausgewogenen Weise und Lösung von Problemen, um eine Zukunft für alle zu schaffen. Darüber hinaus entsteht Weisheit aus der Balance zwischen intra-, inter- und extra-personalem Bewusstsein und Engagement. Im Hinblick auf den sozio-zeitlichen Rahmen betont dies den Nutzen sozialer Kohärenz. In diesem Sinne macht die Fähigkeit, den gesamten sozio-zeitlichen Bereich der Welt zu reflektieren und mental zu erfassen, Bewusstseinsintelligenz aus.
LIFESPAN I & II (M. Sager, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 50 cm)
LIFESPAN I & II (M. Sager, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 70 x 50 cm)
Lifespan Development: Cultural norms or personal needs?
Which one would you choose to visualize your life? They may seem quite similar and yet be very different. Both go along nine stages of a lifespan but in different directions and different coloring.
Birth
Kindergarten, school
Work-life
Marriage
Having children
Building/buying a house
Career/Personal development
Retirement
Death
Do you experience different timing, sequences, or different qualities of life stages? Or do you even have different ones than what is socially customary? Maybe there’s indeed a need to rethink the concept of conventional lifespan development. There will still be falling in love, having children, and many other aspects (not to forget spiritual ones). But because today many young people worry about their life ahead, adults struggle with seeing meaning in it, elderly living in apathy long after they’ve stopped to lead a functional one, and then regret or denial on the death bed. Shouldn’t life be more joyful? Without giving prescriptive answers, the following considerations from lifespan psychology may provide some additional perspectives.
When and how one progresses with what personal development step varies a lot between cultures. Even within a particular culture, if not suppressed completely, different life paths can be observed as well. However, the vast majority within a culture chooses to conform with an established “norm.” But do these norms meet the personal desires of a human being, and do they take individual developmental needs into account?
Developmental neurobiological processes are more influential in early life stages (i.e., childhood), but cultural and social learning effects increase at later life stages.
Individuals in Eastern cultures relate in a more interdependent way than a more individualistic Western understanding of the self. At the same time, though, it was found that even in the East, the desire for some autonomous identity is a universally inherent human feature. Similarly, Parental over-control frustrates children both in the US and China.
19th and 20th century Western and Eastern artists were analyzed, and it was found that Eastern artists tend to arrive at their artistic peak achievement later in life, reflecting the Eastern tradition to emphasize the process to excellence rather than the more Western focus on originality and delivery.
Low self-esteem is linked to depression and reduced subjective well-being. Still, on the other side, heightened self-esteem risks degenerating to narcissism and the need to be better than others, which results in separateness. Instead of such a discriminatory pathway to self-worth, Eastern philosophies, such as Buddhism’s mindfulness practices that promote self-compassion instead, are hopefully more and more (re-)discovered.
Mainly, lifespan development focuses on behavioral and material aspects, while it still discards concepts of expanded consciousness such as the already decades-old self-actualization theory. Also, statistical analysis prevails, and more qualitative research might help understand individuals’ life journeys better and add to a more person-centric and contextual perspective in studying lifespan development.
Economically developed regions, sometimes referred to as Western countries, make up only 20 percent of the world population, while developing economies’ population is even disproportionately continuing to grow. At the same time, economic development in the Non-Western, often collectivist societies is likely to dramatically influence the outcome of related cultures. Therefore, psychology needs to focus more on where the big changes and populations are to understand human development.
To further integrate all relevant aspects of human development, a closer collaboration between life-course sociology and life span psychology seems to be a further promising aspiration. Like the emergence of culture and art marked a new era of Homo sapiens some ten thousand years ago, maybe breakthroughs in understanding human lifespan development related to culture may define the next evolutionary steps of humanity.
I am convinced that more answers lie in how people manage to develop independently of the good opinion of others. In the past, critical thinkers were persecuted and hanged; today, these are considered heroic philosophers. Is it still worthwhile to stand up for something against the resistance of the mainstream? Surely. I believe that this is precisely one of life’s goals: to express one’s ideas, create, and put service to something bigger above one’s own desires.
ROOTS OF INTENTION (INTUITION & IMAGINATION)
M. Sager, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
80 x 80 cm
The term ‘intention’ in medicine means the healing process of a wound. We may create plans based on any beliefs that bring us to an achievement of something out there we think is missing, or we can be drawn to deeper roots that are pulling towards internal healing and recovery of inner truth. While intuition is the messenger from and to our source (or in AWI terms: intra-past), imagination is the force pulling from and to our purpose (extra-future). Intention resides in the inter-present in full cooperation with others, and it is the binding element between intuition and imagination. Intention is the doing between one’s true intuitive being and imaginative becoming. If you have intentions in line with your intuition, even if there seems currently no practical way to act upon, do maintain the thoughts about them, and you’ll keep a healthy attitude. The universe will conspire to co-create over sooner or longer if one stays awaringly alert. The benefits of staying authentic are to reveal in any case. Because even without external stimuli and actions in the here and now, mind-wandering back to intuition and forth into imagination does create present moment emotions and thoughts, similar to real-life experiences. The brain cannot differentiate between real and imagined, and images get memorized similar to experiences. Therefore, intentional mentation is as much real reality for answering the big questions of life beyond practical considerations as is the experience from physical respectively geographical immersion into a socio-cultural and possibly even individually mismatching interpretations of reality. The mere memory or the prospect of a joyful experience can enable a joyful desire to let go of curtailing attachment. It is highly awareness-intelligent to motivate oneself and inspire others to achieve this prospect of joy by accessing the roots on both ends, the past and the future, intuition and imagination.
The awareness for and about humanity as a whole is deliberately removed from the educational and journalistic framework. Instead, scare tactics, celebrity cults, groupthink and stereotyping are encouraged. Herd thinking seals off the boxes in the stables of the mind farms owned by the one percent that owns ninety-nine percent of global resources. In these closed mindset farms, people’s ignorance gets exploited. The domesticated herd of human livestock is fed and paid well enough to not revolt. Everything gets automated, and the thought-farming industry leaders stay mostly out of sight. Almost all of the financial means of this world are invested in businesses that help the money multiply. So, the breeding goes on and ever more extensive and efficient platforms are created for the keeping of human farm animals.
We can hold a rose despite its thorns. It’s the same with touching a defensive soul. The art lies in not attacking, respecting the thorns, and not hurting yourself. That’s the only way to make prickles unnecessary eventually.
LEARNING FROM THE INTRA-PAST
M. Sager, 2021
Acrylic on board
50 x 70 cm
Learning for life, for one’s own identity, is learner-led and requires conditions of personal freedom; this also applies when learning from the past. The free Self (one’s intrapersonal level), not culture, societal history, religion, and judgment of others around us, teaches us about our true Self.
There are three main obstacles to self-reflective learning from the intrapersonal past (or short in Awareness Intelligence terms, ‘intra-past’)
Obstacle 1: Focus on inter- and extra-personal aspects of the past
The extrapersonal level of the past can be defined as the societal scope beyond interpersonal relationships, including the historic narratives we get during raising, enculturation, and religious education. In the worst case, traditions, beliefs, religious scripts, etc., strictly adhere to fundamentalist attachment. Especially older people sometimes show a propensity towards retrospective non-self-related thoughts. One explanation is that age can cause a weakened ability to recall individual (intrapersonal) past experiences. But others possess the cognitive ability and stick to the non-intrapersonal aspects in creating their worldview. Societal pressure, lack of personal freedom and agency, and learned mechanisms to defend privileges are possible reasons. In any case, a strong emphasis on family history and ancestral heritage usually holds an individual back from updating one’s self-concept meaningfully as advantageous for adaptations to current and future situations. It is to hope that we create the conditions for individuals to be closer to themselves, which is the only way to become closer with humanity overall.
Obstacle 2: Exclusive mindfulness in the intra-present
See upcoming painting
Obstacle 3: Over-identification with the inter-present
We are treated and coached all the time. That is good for the gross national product; but is it also for us? Doesn’t the ever-increasing over-pedagogy of the young and over-treatment of the elderly mean that our upbringing and education do not make us self-effective individuals?
Torn by our loved ones
Listening to everyone means having to bend over the top. Looking back and planning ahead at the same time is difficult, especially when it comes to the interpersonal level. And for most people, it’s about the relationship level. Should we let them draw us into a drawer and hold us back?
Only your own past counts
The way we look at family and friends is actually always the cause of problems. Expectations, inadequacies, regrets, fear of being alone, etc. That is why our thoughts in the past should stay with ourselves. Only with us, because we all got everything we need as human beings. During the first nine months, nobody had to tell us how we were going to develop.
The meaning of a larger whole
Thoughts in the future should be less on the intra- and interpersonal level. Yes, we will lose everything one day, and we cannot insure ourselves against death either. Neither can we protect others from it; that’s part of life. What we can do, however, is to leave something other than rubbish and weakening structures for the planet and the next generations. Service to a larger whole is ultimately the only deeper meaning in life.
What a significant purpose of life: Life isn’t about learning to fit in somewhere; it is about creating somebody new.
Socio-cultural identities
Of course, you may want to stay social and cooperative with people in your life. However, with time, the nature of these relationships might transform as your awareness regenerates. Separation from yourself and others means, in a psycho-spiritual way, that you let go of your identity, which is based on social conformity and cultural beliefs that would be misbeliefs in a different culture. You also must let go of attachment to others’ judgments, which are opinions only and have little if anything to do with truth. By distancing yourself from the idealized role you have learned to assume during all the years of education, socialization, and enculturation, you begin to see who you really are.
Don’t waste your thoughts on interpreting equipment, façade styles, and fashions. They are not relevant to our true selves, and they go as fast as they came. We are not our social personalities. Clinging to our social identity and old ways of thinking about ourselves makes us, in any case, matter less than we deserve. Artificial rules that protect selfish interests are not natural laws of life. So don’t take them so seriously!
Children are dependent on the care received from their parents and other adults in the culture they are born into. For them, inter-psychological learning, the influence of other people is unavoidable. Their survival depends on following their caregivers. Such dependencies should not exist anymore later in life, though. An adult person can re-build their own identity intra-psychologically. There is a possibility, even a necessity to recognize your socio-cultural independence. It is a trap to let others’ opinions and beliefs define one. Therefore, such an awareness allows you to free yourself from backward-related definitions of your person by others.
Losing one’s identity
When I moved abroad and ended up being on myself in a completely different culture, there was nobody and nothing anymore that would have supported and validated my identity at that time. For my new environment far away from my former social networks, jobs, and possessions that had defined me to a significant extent for a long time, too, I then was left to be just an unknown foreigner. Therefore, I could not and did not have to live up to any story anymore. What an opportunity. I’ve realized how foolish it had been to build one’s personality too much on the unstable ground of externals.
Meanwhile, having left most of the external things and values behind, there has remained one true identity-giving source: The inner self that connects all of us on a deeper human level. I’ve found this true self when mentalizing back to before I had grown into an adult body, before I was associated with a particular social status and related privileges, and before I started to hold on to a variety of achievements and acquisitions. Then, literally as an alien in a foreign country, I became aware of what was left, what will always be left, and I mentally returned to the core of whom I am: The consciousness that is all and my origin of life. For all my life, I was looking for happiness. Then I found meaning. And when I accepted meaning, happiness became meaningless. That’s when I started to really enjoy life again; joy through the effort to create awareness-intelligently an identity instead of blindly assuming one that’s tried to be assigned to me. That’s also when I better understood what it means to be an artist.
When you experience meaninglessness, low motivation, and urges to give up, it is helpful to check the extra-future element and probe its awaring, for example, as follows. Ask yourself: Am I creating in line with life, the life that continues in all human evolution beyond my family, my party, my nation, my race, etc., or do I identify with such social constructs on which can’t be hold on to in the perishable physical world? If it is the latter, feelings of meaninglessness could stem from such a misidentification. One might feel that clearly when losing somebody close when having lost a job, or being rejected from a social group. We must die to our ego during a lifetime voluntarily. As we shift from socio-cultural group identity to a universally valid life membership, we will have found our purpose in life as well. The ego cannot be overcome by disabling the mind (as sometimes advertised in meditation classes). Selflessness is achieved by thinking awareness-intelligently about the egoless self, through non-transactionality in meeting others and focusing on a mutually beneficial future in all humanity’s interest.
Achieving a symmetrical, congruent (awareness-intelligent) identity
We can clearly feel that we separate mental awareness from bodily sensations and instead picture the wholeness and infinity of life. We can change our way of thinking. The most profound, impactful, and sustainable way to change is to change the layer from where thought arises: awareness. The human condition is no longer dependent on social identity alone. It learns to integrate the three modes of the intra-past, the inter-present, and the extra-future into increased and undivided awareness (for the detailed explanation, see https://mathias-sager.com/tag/awareness-intelligence/). As our thoughts and actions become more symmetrical (and our business and private cards more congruent), life will never feel like a lie again.
Becoming a genuine leader is founded on mastering self-leadership and being at peace with oneself and the world. To serve as a role model, one must be ready to give up their title and position. Too dissonant can a professional identity become with the aware self. How could one ever enjoy people who admire rather their title-based authority and social status rather than knowing about their creativity, vulnerability, and loving character in the first place?
It can look the same, but not at the same time. Green, greensand, ochre, umber, blue, turquoise. Land and water, summer and winter. Compiling it all into one at once, that’s how I show you the world. I love you, child of the soul.
Is it the shore of a lake or the coast of an island?
The view towards the water. Watching the depths of the psyche. Both fascinating and frightening. Overcoming the fear of the hidden, that’s how I’d like you to understand the world. I love you, child of wisdom.
Is it to float or to dive?
To immerse without the need to walk on water, meeting intuition and inspiration. The conscious and the unconscious. Blurring, transcending the physical boundaries, that’s how we can connect across the worlds. I love you, child of the muse.
It cannot be seen, and yet it can be made visible. A tapestry, a matrix of combined dimensions. And layers of consciousness, awareness. Light and triangular roundness, everything else illusion and darkening. Our duty to show it so that it is not forgotten. When you are overwhelmed by reality that is ever passing quickly, come back to the Eternal that grows in the field of the soul.
Es kann nicht gesehen, und doch sichtbar gemacht werden. Ein Wandteppich, eine Matrix kombinierter Dimensionen. Und Bewusstseinsschichten. Licht und dreieckige Rundungen, alles andere Illusion und Verdunkelung. Unsere Pflicht, es zu zeigen, damit es nicht vergessen wird. Wenn du von der immer schnell vergehenden Realität überwältigt wirst, komm zurück zum Ewigen, das auf dem Acker der Seele wächst.
This painting is a suggestion for the symbol that could represent the novel term and concept of Awareness Intelligence™. It’s time for a new understanding of awareness, instead of maintaining old and incomplete notions of it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said more than a hundred years ago that history should be banned from school. I agree in the sense that the common issue of glorifying the past and using it to legitimate and reinforce established power structures, for example in politics, is hindering real improvement. The world needs new solutions to old problems. A spirit-based awareness to overcome ego-based identification is needed. Rather than closing down for victories, humanity needs to open up for progress. Just because things are our culture, they are not necessarily good. Good is what increases awareness.
For the original research and related articles about Awareness Intelligence, you can visit www.mathias-sager.com
In the US, one in six persons currently takes a psychotropic drug. In Switzerland, around one in ten regularly consume prescribed antidepressants. This population is a minority; all the others manage to live without, and so can you.
Modern psychopharmacology began in 1950 with the synthesis of chlorpromazine. Only from then on, the industry started to produce, patent, and market its invented/categorized types of diagnoses and related pills. Remember that before 1950 you most likely would have been considered mentally healthy.
The psyche is more than the bio-mechanical brain, and only you know what’s in your soul (again, which is not to be reduced to the physiology of the brain). Why should mood, way of thinking, and motivation be possible to be “repaired” by a so-called soul plumber (in German: Seelenklemptner) who is even not addressing the soul?! Shouldn’t psychological challenges be resolved psychologically (and psycho-spiritually) instead of chemically?!
You don’t have to compare yourself anymore with your friends who are all so super successful, happy, and beautiful (according to today’s conventional notion). If you don’t aspire for the hedonistic treadmill of advertised consumption-based happiness, you will realize that you might already be happier than you were made to believe.
That you feel down might not be a genetic defect to be corrected with a pill. Prenatal, childhood, and everyday stress (see also point 3) is the main risk for affective disorders, such as depression and even Schizophrenia. Stress also affects the immune system, which is central to the nervous system and the brain’s health. Have you ever thought of reducing stress in the first place?
Antidepressants are prescribed too quickly as remedies for possibly only temporary periods of low moods that are hastily diagnosed as clinical depressions without a holistic (biopsychosocial) understanding of the situation. Antidepressants are often hardly more effective than placebo, according to the latest studies (e.g., the 2019 study of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Kopenhagen). The world is how you see it, and the treatment that works is that which you believe in. Can you think that learnable mental strategies might be healthier and more effective than pills? I know that you get the medication subsidized by the health insurance company, while the learning to control your mind and to understand the soul has to be borne by yourself. Become more independent, invest in yourself instead of in pharmaceutical companies! Such self-efficacy is a huge reward in itself.
Almost more likely than a positive effect is unwanted considerable side effects that can irreversibly persist even after stopping taking the medication: These side effects include sexual dysfunction, nausea, vomiting, restlessness, and sleep disorders.
Being in control is highly satisfying and a key factor for one’s well-being. So, do you want medically enforced distancing from your emotions, and therefore allow the obscurification of your mental faculties that are disabling the possibility for self-reflection with a clear mind? Observing in an accepting and learning attitude how a lousy mood dissolves anyway might provide the lessons to unlearn learned helplessness and enable self-help and personal growth.
Are you against (synthetic) drugs? Then follow through. How about learning to “be high on your own supply?” There are plenty of possibilities like breathing techniques (the most fundamental function of the body that impacts all its workings), exercising, creative expression, nature exposure (e.g., cold water -> no pain, no gain! :-)), and especially thoughts and acts of kindness.
As with maintaining physical hygiene, it can be good in the mental world to dust off old and prevent new pollution from anxious thinking. Desires for security and the associated fear of loss darken the mind, which leads to defense, exclusion, hatred and aggression (incidentally, ignorance and avoidance are also passive forms of hostility). Have you ever tried a media diet and stopped listening to all the bad things that tempt you to take external measures (e.g. pills)? During a news detox, you will soon feel better and begin to take care of yourself instead of acquiring external effects that are supposed to do that for you.
Life is proving us constantly that peace is possible to the extent human awareness is embracing it. Consequently, if all the world is scoped-in for ambitions of peace, a peaceful world indeed becomes attainable. An awaria can come through the dissolution of the illusion of separated and separating personal and societal identities, which would not be bounded together by life across times. It will be a future world in which all human beings are aware of their shared awareness of life. Thanks to intelligent awareness, the relational and temporal modes of life will be better understood, accepted as an essential truth, and consequently being acted upon for individual well-being, collective thriving, and the common good. Awarian life is possible thanks to the systematic and continuous practice of Awareness Intelligence, the chief liberating and humanitarian enabler of a new age.
Having learned English, French, and Japanese while living and working in different cultures, and as a global citizen, psychologist, and artist, languages (words, images, and the heart) are vital for me every day. Research into the psychology of language, or psycholinguistics, has helped better understand the mental aspects of language and speech with new and innovative implications on how we approach learning from a cognitive, emotional, and behavioral level.
Language organizes thoughts
You can perceive the world with your five senses and experience feelings and emotions without words. However, Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” which I find accurate. What if everything is just “cool?” Reports from people losing language as a result, for example, of brain tumors, evidence that when they cannot describe the world with words anymore, it essentially remains unchanged and, for that matter, unchangeable. Grasping, developing, and changing concepts requires analysis and interpretation of reality, which is accomplished through structured language. Only through organizing one’s thoughts can we fix ideas, reflect on, and monitor them. This inner, explicitly linguistic thinking enables consciousness to become awareness (for my differentiation between consciousness and awareness, see https://mathias-sager.com/2021/05/02/soulfires-flames/). Unfortunately, blissful quitting of thinking in meditation or distractions seems to be more in vogue than thinking critically about one’s thinking; for me, the main challenge of humanity. Again, we may think without language, but language lets us know that we are thinking.
The language of images
There are around 7000 languages spoken in the world today. However, there are many more different languages like specialty languages (e.g., computer languages), sign languages, even smell, and the language of images and music. As an artist, I have a visual vocabulary, which sometimes is not translatable to any words that I’d know. My inner speech while painting often isn’t either in German or English, but purely of images. I love to switch to the mode where I utter thoughts with colors. As my paintings and accompanying texts illustrate, the artistic language of colors, forms, and textures is more direct, compact, shorter, and faster than the concepts described in words.
I like that my artistic language for me is more independent from socio-cultural conventions. Although language helps to connect and build communities, it is used to exclude and manipulate. For example, my daughter and I are told not to use German anymore, which constitutes a strategy of maternal gatekeeping and parental alienation. [-> I love you, Natalie! As always, this work is for you!]
The ambiguity of language
The ambiguity of language can easily cause erroneous thinking. That is probably why many of us discover that life hadn’t turned out as we were told and had planned when we were younger. For example, all the promises about happiness primarily addressing only the hedonistic aspects of the term. The same with love; are we always clear what we mean by it: romantic, affectionate, familiar, playful, or selflessly compassionate?
Any language is possibly imperfect, so we all need to find the combinations of levels of perceptions, spoken words, and expressive means that serve us well.
Is what we teach our children mutually beneficial for other children too? Is our teaching inclusive and useful to all humanity? Is it timeless? If so, these are awareness-intelligent lessons worth to be spread. Such shared insights would come from and support full human potential. Unfortunately, the propagation of obscured views is in vogue. It seems like blind people are leading blind people and nobody realizes the lack of sight. Possible, because “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a king,” as the proverb goes. In any case, many do feel that there is something wrong. All the unnecessary conflicts and aggression are the awareness-blind persons’ desperate canes searching for a way out of disorientation and anticipating hurting clashes. It’s the awareness-blind persons’ own helplessness and frustration that leads them to hatred, self-harming, and violent behavior. Without prescribing a specific cure, it’s always possible to provide everybody in minimum a reference system to aid their orientation to find their cure themselves. If we teach humantime by means of explaining and internalizing the socio-temporal matrix, Awareness Intelligence, and therefore peace will ensue. If you want to re-produce your humanness beyond survival mode, create and enthusiastically inspire others by teaching how to consciously apply systematic thinking to activate the inner eye of awareness that is including the full scope of the socio-temporal system of human life.
[Excerpt from ‘Awareness Intelligence’. See also earlier posts for more context and details]
Often breakthrough findings are the simplest ones. If something can’t be explained easily, it is not well understood. If spirituality is advertised as requiring miraculous super-powers hold by few, it might be spiritual elitism that is not for all of us. An awareness-intelligent understanding of spirituality may be considered prosaic considering its modest level of mysticism involved, and yet it is whole and infinite, full of all the beauty and joy that life has to offer. Spirituality is simple and pure humaneness, it is the ultimate mental playground of human realization. We are all spiritual beings; we just need to be aware of and practicing it.
To organize our thinking about life, mind, and soul is not creating a false god. Neither has a logical arrangement have to deteriorate into a dogmatic belief system. Indeed, what wisdom means for one person may have a completely different meaning and quality for somebody else. What feels right at one time becomes obsolete later on. It’s of limited usefulness to name a spiritual authority or to lay down religious rules and rituals if not for institutional interests. The same is true for so-called consciousness-enhancing substances. However, there is a universal structure of life that we should all be aware of.
THE SOCIO-TEMPORAL MATRIX OF MENTAL WORLDVIEW SCHEMAS
A person’s worldview, i.e., the schema through which the world is experienced, influences one’s well-being. Cloninger’s ‘unity of being’ represents a model of a coherent self-concept that consists of the self, others, and the world as a whole and has an impact on the degree of self-reliance, hope, the ability to cope, compassion, and cooperativeness. In that sense, the socio-temporal matrix as a framework to identify and visualize worldviews can facilitate the exploration of similar possible psychological effects related to a person’s meaning-making and well-being through socio-temporal worldviews.
Figure 1. The socio-temporal matrix of worldview schemas
The novel socio-temporal matrix is derived as described in the following and as visualized by Figure 1. On the x-axis of the model, there are three variables of the temporal dimension. More specifically, this horizontal axis partitions itself, in the order from left to right, into the ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future.’ The vertical y-axis of the matrix contains the three variables of the social dimension. Starting from the intersection with the horizontal axis, which represents time as explained, the first third of the vertical line (y-axis) shall be labeled ‘intra-’ that is short for ‘intra-personal. The next, middle part of the vertical axis becomes ‘inter-,‘which stands for the ‘inter-personal’ scope. The third and uppermost vertical section is the ‘extra-,‘ which signifies ‘extra-personal.’ Similar to a coordinate system, through these two tripartite grid lines, a matrix can be formed (see Figure 1). When using the vertical and horizontal axis’ labels in the same manner as the numerical coordinates of a map, or the letters and numbers of a chessboard, it is possible to identify and navigate the three times three – in total nine – fields of the matrix (see Figure 1).
The nine fields of the matrix will be used to inquire about socio-temporal mental schemas. An individual’s worldview schema is expected to consist of a specific set of matrix fields, depending on whether one’s belief system emphasizes certain socio-temporal mental states over others. For example, one may emphasize other-related extra-past (e.g., socio-cultural upbringing), behave in an inter-present, rather relationship-dominated way, while focusing, however, on a self-oriented intra-future. Such a socio-temporal mental worldview schema might link to specific meanings as, for example, a more independent (i.e., denoted by the intra-past instead of an inter- or extra-past) and other-oriented (i.e., depicted as the extra-future rather than an inter- or intra-future) cognitive socio-temporal worldview preference.
Regarding the above-mentioned social dimension, the intra-personal, inter-personal, and extra-personal factors have been found to influence human perception, experience, and the capacity to manage life areas such as risks. Intra-personal means the thoughts and beliefs related to the individual herself. A definition of inter-personal comes from those thoughts and beliefs, which are related to personal interactions with others. Extra-personal can be defined as a social scope that goes beyond the direct interaction with others. Extra-personal beliefs are related to long-term interests such as social needs that surpass intra- and inter-personal benefits. They can comprise social relationships beyond group memberships, i.e., being a member of the whole human species.
What’s your socio-temporal schema constellation? What combinations of meaningful and often frequented social and temporal aspects within the socio-temporal matrix do emerge and predominate in your mind-wanderings?
You can also discover the adventure of your socio-temporal worldview here:
