Mindell's Secondary Processes

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[Francis]

I've been studying Arnold Mindell's work lately. He implies that all disease and conflict are the result of repressed secondary processes. (Primary processes are deliberate whereas secondary processes are spontaneous). If we resist what is happening (the emerging secondary process) for long enough it will make us sick and/or fighting mad. To avoid these things, Mindell advocates searching out emerging processes and allowing them full expression.  Here's a good quote:

Most traditional spiritual practices are behavioural programs. They teach you to behave in a certain way and to see certain kinds of perceptions as wrong or insignificant…you may feel that part of you is accepted but a whole other part isn't…if you're a good ecologist, you have to wonder where your signals and processes -- the parts of you seeking expression -- go when you disavow or let go of them. Now we know that the world is very small, and [these things don’t] just disappear. It goes into your body, into a less tractable process, maybe a cellular or metabolic or [disease] process. Or it goes into your partner, who hates you. Or it goes into accidents on the street corner or into the collective, for you and me to pick up. Devaluing certain perceptions and just letting them go is like tossing wastepaper onto the street. Somebody has to clean it up eventually. Spiritual practices talk a lot about compassion, but compassion also means having compassion toward all your perceptions, even the unhappy or unfortunate ones, and trying to process them.

I look for the spirit of the incomprehensible statement, gesture or error and then care for it and let it unfold…the gold lies in the messages which we do not intend to send. ~ Mindell

[henry]

Francis, i'm guessing there is a difference between reading about secondary process and experiencing secondary process in one of Arnold and Amy's groups ? i've read some of his writings but never "been there". i have become, however, an internet forum secondary process expert 

[Francis]

Thanks Henry. Once I learned the elements of Mindell’s model, I started to see how it works without ever attending any groups. Mindell's model is a powerful tool for expanding awareness. It’s really just a logical extension of Jung’s ideas, an attempt to mold Jung’s ideas into a more practical model for everyday use. For example, Jung’s ‘synchronicities’ are examples of Mindell’s ‘signals from unoccupied channels’.  Jung’s ‘unconscious’ is equivalent to Mindell’s ‘dreambody’. Dreams are, of course, secondary processes.

I think that we’re all experiencing secondary processes all the time, except we tend to ignore them. Freudian slips, wardrobe malfunctions, bad hair days, twitches, ticks, sensations. Unless someone is deliberately trying to express themselves through body language, like say a dancer or mime, then practically all their body language is a secondary process. Everything that is unplanned and uncontrived is a secondary process. All natural reactions to conscious endeavors are secondary processes. You can never do merely one thing. Any action taken to alleviate a problem or initiate a response will trigger several effects, some of which will offset or negate the intended effect. Every deliberate action is part of a primary process and every such action has an equal and opposite reaction that’s part of a secondary process.

 

Potent leadership is a matter of being aware of what is happening in the group and acting accordingly. Specific actions are less important than the leader's clarity or consciousness. That is why there are no exercises or formulas to ensure successful leadership. All behavior consists of opposites or polarities. If I do anything more and more, over and over, its polarity will appear. For example, striving to be beautiful makes a person ugly, and trying too hard to be kind is a form of selfishness.
Any over-determined behavior produces its opposite:
- An obsession with living suggests worry about dying.
- True simplicity is not easy.
- Is it a long time or a short time since we last met?
- The braggart probably feels small and insecure.
- Who would be first ends up last.
~ John Heider

[henry]

Appreciation for the John Heider quote Francis. John was a beloved esalen luminary leader who had the rare awareness skills in group to navigate "secondary process" waters in a helpful way . He passed away a year ago this week in Lawrence Kansas

[Jana]

Yea Saniel Bonder talks of this, not sure if it was his own realization, Da's or Buber's.
One can think of it as action in space...the violence of the effort extended to produce change/motion creates an equal and opposite effect. Secondary process, blowback, karma become negative when our force of will is not in alignment with the bonding force needed to hold positive synchronicity in order. The numinous is perfect omniscient communication which we can delve into through Flow, peak experience, samadhi and are informed by through psi, dreams, visions, voices and intuitions. This spacetime Field of perfect omniscient information is the chessboard on which we play our multi-leveled games of light and dark. When we try and rectify a wrong we pull more and more garbage into the gravitation well of our intention. Set out however, in alignment with the vibration of our most profound goal and the gravitation well of our intention will work-with the laws of the universal creatrix to synchronistically bring about greater order.

Very good Francis: "I think that we’re all experiencing secondary processes all the time, except we tend to ignore them. Freudian slips, wardrobe malfunctions, bad hair days, twitches, ticks, sensations. Unless someone is deliberately trying to express themselves through body language, like say a dancer or mime, then practically all their body language is a secondary process. Everything that is unplanned and uncontrived is a secondary process. All natural reactions to conscious endeavors are secondary processes. You can never do merely one thing. Any action taken to alleviate a problem or initiate a response will trigger several effects, some of which will offset or negate the intended effect. Every deliberate action is part of a primary process and every such action has an equal and opposite reaction that’s part of a secondary process."

[Francis]

Do you mean Bonder’s concept of broken zones?

Broken zones is a phrase that I came up with… You say something or touch someone, and the reaction they have is wildly disproportionate to what just happened.  …a man or a woman might say to their partner something, and the other person just disappears, implodes.  Or, they explode; it's like ballistic attack coming back…I came to see that they're broken in the sense that they're broken off from our normal daily identity, our sense of ourself.  And everybody has got these cutoff fragments of identity that we've had to cut off from, in order to survive.  They're not bad, they're not wrong, but there is this discontinuity with them, and that's the sense of brokenness. ~Bonder                                                         http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/230-expanded-lovemaking/episodes/28125-white-hot-awakening-trust-part-two

Assuming that a secondary process is an artifact of a repressed sub-personality, the sub lacks any ‘manners’ in a social sense; it’s unsocialized. The trouble with this concept (broken zones) is that it’s difficult to work with people that have been pushed over an edge like Bonder is describing. (An edge is defined by Mindell as a border between the primary and secondary processes)  When pushed, the extrovert explodes into a rage, while the introvert is plunged into a deep, black depression. There is a strong tendency to just repress the sub-personality in order to stabilize the situation. Mindell gently leads the person to the edge and asks the person to cross it, rather than pushing them suddenly over the precipice. The sub-personality needs to be activated consciously, not accidentally, for the process to help integrate the personality.
  As Jung pointed out, the sudden invasion of the personality with unconscious content causes insanity. Individuation is rather the conscious embrace of unconscious content, at a pace that does not unduly overwhelm the personal identity (i.e. primary process).

[Jane]

Wonderful discussion.  I am reminded of the movie: Black Swan. 

Becoming the witness of our own behaviour, rather than only being the one enacting the behaviour, makes all the difference in autonomy and freedom.  It is a very tricky area though to move into and even more so as a 'therapist' on someone else's behalf.  I am not sure it is even really possible to do anything except one's own work, which includes especially what comes up for me when I see dissonance. When I see someone else disconnected and running a secondary process, my secondary conditioning is to disconnect from what I am observing and to go into my meaning-making mind to make sense of it, or 'fix' the dissonance.  The challenge is to continue witnessing both myself and the other AND to hold the connection between us.  I am a fledgling at this, so fledgling I feel very humble.... however, I am pretty sure that this fledgling state is for me, or any of us, the emergence of the embodied integral mind. 

[henry]

This brings to mind "gestalt practice" which has been central to the core of esalen for decades. You can google/wikipedia "gestalt practice" for more information. Christine Price(tribal ground) and Steven Harper are wonderful exemplars in this tradition, and John Callahan has written a fine "Manual of Gestalt Practice" honoriing my friend/hero Richard Price

[Jane]

Yes, Henry, thanks. It is the gestalt aspect, that dimension of unjudged conscious experience, and the same again: Rumi's field that sets us free at last...uh, well, for as long as we can stand, or our friends and family can stand of us, the earth can stand of all all the secondary process running the place into a chaotic mess.

[Jana]

Some freak just knocked on my door at 12.30am, now I'll never get to sleep.

I am not that happy with primary and secondary processes as terms...and conscious and unconscious doesn't really cut it either. True and false self doesn't cut it either...these are simplistic terms we use to try and grasp the ungraspable...

http://jana-sovereignstate.blogspot.com/2011/06/real-and-maze.html

[Jana]

No, movement generating opposing force is a paragraph in the beginning of Waking Down by Bonder...
BOK "That night Mr. Universal was cameraman at his friends book talk. Alarmingly he proceeds to set up his camera not four feet from where I was seated. Whereupon I respond with a series of panic attacks and with each wave he sensed my panic and backed away from me. I had just read in this authors book that energy applied to counter something sets up an opposite effect, like being in the nongravity of space and punching forward while being bodily forced backwards. Having read this I was trying to digest the panic without trying to counter it, as each wave washed over me."

That is instead of resisting the charge of emotion, by going "into it" the Universe doesn't push back in resistance or repulsion...therefore the flow of happenstance is less convoluted, diverted and dissipated. This the key to overcoming paradoxical intent and the compartmentalized self. In this we exude a mothering embrace of all that may be, undefended and unafraid of truths...because of a prior acceptance of full sensate embodied existence. It is a kind of energy transparency of getting out of one's own way in order to stop creating interference patterns in the noosphere.

[Jane]

So there is the paradox of being autonomous while in the flow.  My autonomy is partial when I am in a variable state of reactivity with everything around me.  Even though Bliss cannot be altered by gain or loss.... embodying this is quite a trip... learning to not resistance my own resistance....Turtles all the way down and around again to the beginning and the newest moment arising
. 

[Jana]

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110603/full/news.2011.346.html
Consider that they have actually manifested light out of the vacuum with mirrors. Happenstance is a canvas that we paint on consciously and unconsciously. We "Know Thyself" as we learn to paint consciously, and choose the form, function and style of our art piece. If we choose a cruel, rough and unnatural canvas the finished painting will reflect the ground on which we paint...the struggle against our foundations will be seen through the layers of paint. If we choose to distract ourselves with the banal, that too will be seen in the results. If we fail to arrive at a significant "idea" and have nothing real to say...this revealed in the stunning lack of interest displayed. If we are to paint a masterpiece we must choose our canvas, our subject, our paints, our mood and our Muse accordingly and be true to the force of creation or otherwise be an anathema to one's Self.

[Jane]

I have not heard of the vacuum light thing.... but the painting metaphor is beautiful and spot on... I completely get what you are saying.... We are all living mythic lives as grand artists.... and our works are on display individually and collectively, all the time, in all their various aspects of completenss.... we are invited, even begged,
 by some future force of love to Be a cosmic, conscious life artist.....to bring beauty, truth and beauty here... as my sister Jocelyn say, "Don't you know it is your duty, IT IS YOUR DUTY, To bring love into this town"

[henry]

Jane you the Woman. Don't vacuum during a lightning storm ... What a beautiful family: your Mom had Findhorn/Thomas Berry connections way back when,and sister Jocelyn knows who is bringing love into This Town