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Image: naked elderly white man with his back to a chimpanzee; both looking up into the sky with similar facial expressions

“I say enduring because humans are truly unique in the long timescale of our goals and in our flexibility to choose which goals we most wish to prioritize. One promising method for reaching clarity in our goals and becoming less immediately reactive to our evolved instincts is the practice of meditation, which has received increasing research attention in positive psychology. As Robert Wright has written about so convincingly in Why Buddhism Is True, the disciplined practice of meditation, over time, can help one to become less slavish to our evolved instincts and be kinder, gentler, and happier as a result. It can also help one witness more beauty in the world.”

-Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D., Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin's Guide to Living a Richer Life

Scientific American: Beautiful Minds: Toward a Positive Evolutionary Psychology

I am not a full fan of Kaufman...I kinda want to be...I've tried listening to his podcast, The Psychology Podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman...but we have a visceral revulsion to a lot of pop positive psychology. This excerpt is from the forward of his book. (Disclaimer: I have not read the book. I want to read it, but I am afraid I will be disappointed.) The quote reiterates what I preach about a lot—more of me working to come up with a comprehensive philosophy than anything else—and what follows is another variation on these ideas and thoughts. I will use headings to help navigate to where one may want to read.

Evolutionary Psychology and the Ideologies of Žižek

So much of who we are is driven by our evolutionary drives. Drives that evolved phenotype like ideologies (Hegel, Lacan, Zizek etc.) (psyche reflecting evolution, Eph) in which we perceive the world and justify our actions. It is true those primitive pheno-ideologies got us here, and for good reasons too. The “real” is not something that would inspire any organism to thrive and reproduce. Our primitive organic ancestors had to be blind to the existential truth and driven with emotions stronger than reason to evolve even some our most endearing qualities, hope, love, compassion...

The Evolution of Hope

@klp@zirk.us shared today this Kantian quote:

“Hoping ultimately amounts to the conclusion that there is something...because something ought to occur.” Kant, A806/B834

How might have hope evolved? Because the existential reality we were in is not the one we should be in. Reality was too “real” to survive without hope. While that is the rational, we could hardly expect a trait as a hopeful disposition to evolve because of reason. If it did evolve, and we believe it did, it is because those organisms that could hope, to act as if there was hope, in whatever primitive manner, were selected by nature. Of course the same hypothetical can apply to all our other primitive ideological mental models, including desire, power, status etc.

The Practice

These desires, drives, and pervasive fantasies are so much of all of us that when one starts contemplating them, the shadow nature of humanity, we naturally lean to reacting in two polar opposites. The easy one is nihilistic thinking. The other pole is compassion and hope. Compassion and hope not just for ourselves, not just for all of humanity, but for all life and the world. While we don't practice any sort of mystical or spiritually inclined meditation, and what Kaufman proposes is secular enough, but in ours, we strive to explore many of our beliefs and behaviors on a deep meditative level. We do enough of the self-psychoanalytical deep dives reading the likes Zizek and his ilk. What works for us is not just meditative but a somatic meditative exploration. Deep down, what is the feeling, where is the feeling, what does it feel like to want to be seen as powerful, have status, wealth, to be able to have any mate I desire, etc. In exploring these primitive drives, we are looking beyond our mundane projection of ourselves, rather we look for those aspect of humanity dark and reoccurring archetypes we see in media, literature, culture, films etc. What does it feel like to hate the other, where is that hate, hot, cold, pressure, or even fear. Fear is a constant and comes up again and again.

Meditating on the Five Aggregates of Buddhism

Much of this can be found in Buddhism although it is framed by the culture, time, and beliefs. Those frames of ideology are not always comfortable for the rational mind. I found meditating on the five aggregates something I believed in and wanted to explore deeply from perspective deeper than intellectual contemplation. I wanted to gnow the truth and place of the five aggregates in myself. I saw it as a practice where I could go deep into my/our evolutionary psyche. Those aggregates (which I now interpret as evolutionary ideologies) are, with my interpretation of them, vital for philosophers and psychologists in my opinion: 1) Form (physical reality), 2) Sensation (reality conveyed by the senses), 3) Perception (in the Buddhist sense, this is the labeling of sensations – signs), 4) Mental Formation (biases, prejudices, interests, etc.), and 5) Consciousness (basically I interpret this is our ability to be conscious of these things, including that we are conscious of being conscious). While I've had a long history of contemplative practices beginning with esoteric Catholic practices, what I love, and I think other deep thinkers here will like is, we can meditate on these deep thoughts (sure we need to create a blank slate at the beginning of each session), and we can also investigate them somatically. And I think, hypothesize, that those somatic insights will help us overcome these deep seated, subconscious programming, or at least manage them in ways that we are able to be mindfully responsive to situations rather than reactive with self-justifications, that are not really just from a higher perspective than the mundane.

One of our fantasies are meditation centers devoted to understanding ourselves from an evolutionary psychological perspective and/or devoted to exploring the five aggregates.

I believe there is hope for us if we can learn from what evolutionary psychology and the various schools and practices of mindfulness have to teach. I believe we want this, but as my idols would say, our fear of attaining (or fear of losing) what we want perpetuates the Ouroboros of absurdity. I have hope there is a way to step out of the absurdity.

#EvolutonaryPsychology #psychology #philosophy #PositivePsychology #Zizek #evolution #mindfulness #meditation #Buddhism @fediphilosophy.org@fediphilosophy.org @writing.exchange@writing.exchange @zirk.us@zirk.us

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