Locus of Focus: Shifting Identities & Healing the Subject-Object Split

In this episode Dr. Sally and Dr. Jen explore our shifting identity structures and healing the subject-object split. 

Transcript

S1:E6: The Locus of Focus (Transformation as healing the Object Subject split)

0:00  Sally recaps progress to date, phenomenology, identity, modes, practices of transformation. This episode focuses on perhaps the most central technique of transformation (object/subject split, awareness of awareness, witness consciousness),looked at through four different lenses: spirituality, psychology, education and creativity. Sally quotes the Dalai Lama on transforming the mind through meditation. The episode on boundaries already reviewed the mind body split between thinking and feeling. Men tend to think they are their thoughts, and women tend to think they are their feelings – subjective and objective. Unifying these capacities is important, which is how we expand. Our views became specialized, both are true but partial. When we learn to meditate, we begin to turn the view inwards from the external world, turning it to the subjective. We notice the enmeshment with the busy noise of thoughts and feelings, We can begin to witness and manage those very complex waves of phenomena and develop spaciousness, where we can begin to dis-identify, without disassociating

8:58 Jen says we call this shift in the locus of focus as identifying with the conscious observer of thoughts and feelings. This transformation is discussed in a variety of disciplines, like sports, psychology, cognitive sciences, education, all interested in what influences our concentration and attention. This episode is all about the real importance to take a sincere interest in our inner world. Jen then describes her personal experience with the shifting of her locus of focus as someone who experienced adverse childhood experiences. She developed painful constructs- stories, identities, beliefs. These painful intrusive thoughts, or the internal critic built an identity out of painful narratives, and she suffered. She was on the verge of suicide. Through a deep meditative state she learned to be present with herself. Thanks to Eckhart Tolle and Ramana Maharshi, where she learned to ask, Who am I? Who is having this thought? Where does this thought come from? She traced that thought to its source, a neutral place that wasn't the same as the ordinary thinking mind. Meditation and yoga pointing to this spaciousness. She quotes Krishna Murthi. And built intimacy with her own mind, paying attention to that space between thoughts. Her locus of focus shifted. So through her breakdown, she became conscious of her illusions, and shifted her perspective, and identity with her stories to an awareness of those. She quotes Ramana Maharshi … Be aware of the stillness etc

19:54  Sally says this technique is the basis of wisdom and maturity. Life is never the same after this expansion in consciousness. Not having that awareness leads to suffering - the central teaching from the east, that suffering is mis-identification with thoughts and feelings, where this is called the witness consciousness. In adult education, Robert Kegan called it the subject-object transformation. Ken Wilber called it ‘boundarylessness’. Iain McGilchrist pointed out our binary focuses as left and right brain capacities. The left locus of focus is convergent thinking, or ‘doing’and it cuts reality into little parts and fixes them, what I would call our Yang nature, not limited to genders. The right side of the brain, which is more Yin, tends to locus through divergent thinking, looking at the big picture. It's not so boundaried, and is about ‘being’, and is more imaginal, intuitive, embodied. It tends to have an internal focus as opposed to the external focus of the left. We get to have a binary focus, objective subjective. Balanced, healthy people can do both.  When this goes wrong, we can become hyper objective, as in modernity where we look at life as an object, and ‘use’ it, as opposed to ‘nurture’ it. So hyper objectivity or hyper Yang is very problematic on the planet right now. When pathological, it doesn't have any feelings. It just uses reality, and cuts it up into resources. The Hyper Yin is just as problematic, if we're lost in our feelings. And we believe that's who we are, we get nothing done - hyper femininity. So a healthy brain tends to develop both foci, and fluidly switch between them. As needed. Evil itself, if you want to call it that, is hyper objectivity. It doesn't connect or realize the whole system is unified. And hyper unity is also problematic. So now we can talk about the binary brain and how it creates duality. The object of meditation is healing the object subject split, not by dissociating but by feeling and thinking as well as witnessing both these with spaciousness.

 27:56  Jen says having inner intimacy is so critical or we are unaware of the splits we've inherited. As a species we are evolving this capacity to have conscious awareness of both and develop that intimacy, and learn to play and enjoy minds, feelings and identities. She quotes Ramana Maharshi. Realization is not an acquisition of anything, nor is it a new faculty. It is the removal of all camouflage. So we develop a conscious moderator of these different aspects of our inner world. The irony and paradox is the realization that she was looking for something that was within her all the whole time. Great teachers mention this paradox. You have been what you are seeking all along. This realization is the greatest service you can render the world, previously reserved for gurus but now necessary for the collective because the future depends it. We can be two things at once. We have stories, identities and attachments but don’t let them drug us. Your true nature is both the formless untouched, pure conscious awareness of things, and the world of form. Then you can really play and move in both dimensions of self with ease and creativity, not just on the meditation cushion, but in the everyday chaos and mud of life. Jen then quotes Gita Krishna Murthy.

36:41  Sally agrees that the cutting edge of evolution is this new ability to integrate opposites. Modernity devalued the subjective. ‘Truth’ was only available through the objective, and so we developed science etc. Indigenous cultures believe that to truly know something is to personify it. That is a deep wisdom that we lost due to modernity, but it has its own gift. We need both. She then talks about Animism and shamanism. A simple way to notice your own lens is to notice your pronouns, “it/ its”? Or “I/we.” Ken Wilber has pointed out we need all four perspectives, with his quadrant map. We have to become multi perspectival. Sally then talks of the sciences and the arts, as two ways of being and knowing - quantitative, qualitative, both essential - the new integration of yin and the yang foci. She says Wilber and Kegan etc said transformation was moving objectifying the subjective. Her research shows the opposite is equally transformative, subjectifying the object. This has been ignored by some ore linear thinkers. Sally then illustrates this transformation through the arts, from her research in Africa. Creativity is one of the main mechanisms for transformation and future episodes will focus this.

46:00 Jen agrees that we need to include the lens of culture. The podcast is itself integrating subject and object, in this creative way - sharing both subjective interior experiences and objective external research. She quotes from Adyashanti. She concludes that inquiry is an active engagement with our own experience that can cultivate this flash of spiritual insight, as opposed to being swept up in the rushing river of thoughts and feelings. 

50:00  Sally concludes by describing how flashes of insight occur, then can become a cultivated state through practices. And how with enough cultivation of practices, the state itself can become a permanent structure of consciousness, called a stage. Further episodes will discuss this. She ends with a great Hindu metaphor – the god of transformation Shiva, who can transform into forms, and personify great teachings, including Nataraja, the dancer. When the dancer and the dance are no longer separate and become one, the object and subject are no longer split and unity consciousness becomes your identity. Non-duality is then experienced thorugh the arts as meditation. Next episodes will explore this dance - how the subject and object work together, as impulses to ‘merge’ and ‘emerge’ – transcend and include, the yin and the yang of identity.