Herding whose cows?

While cruising online this morning I noticed that Lesley Riddoch has a blog. She is a prominent Scottish media person that I have run into once or twice over the years. We have several mutual friends. Her family comes from around here. She writes well and I reckon her to be a force for the good of the new Scotland and humanity.

But, on reading her blog, I noted being disappointed that it was about the technicalities of issues she is championing. It was not about her ‘self’. I appreciate that this is my problem and not hers. But it raises questions about the nature and purpose of my own blog.

My posts are of two main types. Sometimes I herd the cows of other people and sometimes I herd my own cows.

I herd other people’s cows by providing one-page summaries of their main ideas. I do this for people and topics that hold my attention. When in Lesotho I produced over 600 one-pagers related to the management of education. There have been many others since. My main areas of interest at the moment include mindfulness, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and the way that their concept maps can be overlaid.

There is a back story to these areas of interest. It is rooted in my nature, nurture and various serendipitous events. It includes a range of aims and objectives:

• Make the world a better place
• Find purpose and meaning
• Find better ways to be human
• Develop the ‘spiritual’ aspect of STEEPLES
• Develop ‘spiritual intuition’ (mysticism) as well as reasoned deduction (science)
• Be objective  and ‘slow’ about my ‘fast’ subjectivity
• Rise above the parochiality of encultured worldviews (see the big picture eg Big History)
• Engage in multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary processes with consilience  
• Let it begin with me.

I herd my own cows by noting and problematising the deep existential conundrums surrounding the notions of ‘I’, ‘us’ and ‘them’. This includes the notion of transcending the parochiality of encultured worldviews. Not only the early, natal, sub-cultural ones (upper working class, NE Scotland, mid 20th century) but also the later education and work related ones (scientist, teacher, international education advisor, plain language editor, and sometimes recluse).

Since the 1970s I have had two rallying calls – “the only constant thing is change” and “the only certainty is doubt”. But these were objective notions of the head rather than subjective notions of the heart. In practice there was resistance to change complete with no-go areas and taboos.

For example, for many years, I believed in the power of formal education to change the world; and to think otherwise was taboo. But the contrary evidence built up causing uncertainty and cognitive dissonance. There was stress, manifesting as anxiety and sometimes panic. But it drove me to change my mind about formal education – it set me free from old habits of thought and behaviour.

My working life was in five countries. It was a case of love them and leave them. I was to some extent seduced by the norms of other cultures and this reinforced my attempts to disentangle from the net that was my natal culture.

But, how true are these words, “Give me the child till he is five and I will give you the man.” Today we know that there is neuroplasticity and that it is never too late to change your mind. But there is the problem of figuring the new direction.

For more than ten years I have had a more or less regular daily practice of mindfulness linked to weekly meetings with my Sangha. Through just sitting there has been subjective experience of that to which objective understanding points. The non-egoic peace that is outside time and space. But it is inscrutable, ineffable, and unspeakable. Language did not evolve to deal with this pattern of cognition which sidesteps the category system of conscious/ unconscious.

It is possible to take the position of a witness to what appears in your attention centre. This creates a large mental space that cannot be completely commandeered by thoughts and feelings welling up from the unconscious. The witness is the cool dude who is free from belief and who can easily forsake viewpoints. The eastern traditions are hot on this point:

"Since all virtuous thoughts and actions motivated by clinging to a concrete reality or to a self-cherishing attitude are like poisonous food, give them up. Learn not to cling, but to know the phantom-like nature of experience." (Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thaye)

SO – the nature and purpose of this blog is the herding of cognitive cows. Some are from cutting edge thinkers some are my own. Most of my own involve rejigging my reality with its taboos to the novel patterns of others.

The title of the blog is “changing minds” and it notes that “This blog might end up containing thoughts about the thinking and feeling processes and especially about the dis-ease that comes with thinking outside of the box.” Quite so!

References:

Lesley Riddoch
http://www.lesleyriddoch.co.uk/

Lesotho one-pagers
http://www.toonloon.bizland.com/nutshell/

STEEPLES
https://sites.google.com/site/steeplessrds/

Big History
https://course.bighistoryproject.com/bhplive

Let it begin with me
http://www.srds.co.uk/begin/