Here's a new experience: blogging in bed with the sleeping baby. We're in Casper Wyoming, having arrived late last night after a long set of flights from London, and a long car ride up from Denver on icy roads. Wow. I'd forgotten how cold it gets here. I mean, I remember it intellectually, but he body forgets that feeling. It's cold here!
Anyway, in general the trip went pretty well considering. Laz slept for a lot of the trip, and didn't really seem to mind plane travel much at all. He was much less pleased with the car seat because Sunshine couldn't let him out of his seat and feed him without stopping the car.
This was of course a pretty large source of stress for her too. It really cuts her when he cries, especially if she feels like she could be doing something about it. This can also then strike the nerve in that deep wound of hers and trigger her lockdown reflex. That in turn, triggers her guilt spiral, and in general, it turns into a pretty ugly scene. She is making progress though, and at least now I feel like we are getting some understanding of what's going on and developing some methods for coping, at least with parts of it. I don't know about this deep wound. That anger/lockdown reflex seems pretty low-level and I think we may need to look elsewhere for very specific kind of help for that. Meanwhile, we can work on defusing some of the other interrelated issues ourselves.
Laz broke the eyestalk off the dalek this morning. (Actually, I'm not sure where that piece ended up... I need to find it before it causes more trouble). Anyway, now he has a fine example of that classic genre of children's toys, the slightly broken toy. (Actually he's got a few others, but this is a true classic. I guess I used to have a slew of legless R2D2 figures when I was a kid.) Actually I guess technically it was my toy, but Laz loves it so it's his too now. Besides, it much more fun to be played with (and to watch toys being played with). I'm not really much of a 'keep it in the box' sorta guy.
Laz has really taken pretty well to traveling. He seemed to enjoy his stay at the hotel in Amsterdam, and he has really taken to Kathy (Sunshine's mom). Usually, he has a bit of stranger fear around new people. It took him a while to warm up to Loren (my brother) and David (Sunshine's brother) when they visited, and Jeremy (Sunshine's other brother) is still a bit scary. But Laz is all over Kathy, climbing and laughing and even playing a bit of the chase game. Maybe he senses enough of Sunshine in her, or maybe she's just got "it" (whatever that is), but he has no stranger thing at all with her. (I can't imagine it is a memory from her visit when he was a week old, but maybe the internet chatting helped.) Who knows.
He's napping quite peacefully now, and I'm keeping watch so Sunshine can get some downtime with family. (She desperately needs the downtime too!) While we were putting him to sleep, I was again reminded of my technique for encouraging his sleep. It was one of my intuitive parenting discoveries from quite early on. Basically, while holding or touching him, I close my eyes and breathe slowly and deeply, trying to put myself as close to sleep as possible. (Indeed, the closer I am to nodding off the better.) Then its sort of a matter of just projecting that zone of calm at him. I know this sounds rather new-age goofy. It actually feels rather Buddhist to me, particularly this notion of generating 'sleep energy' (if you will) and embracing or channelling it to him. I suppose, objectively, that it is probably that he is picking up on a million non-verbal body language cues from me. Seeing as he isn't fully emotionally differentiated from Sunshine and I, and because he's still got that infant instinct to imitate, that he ends up adopting my calm to some extent.
Now what strikes me as really interesting this time, is that in Wilber's integral philosophy, both views are valid and useful. The hard-nosed objective view would be the processes as viewed from the 'right hand' (probably lower right?) viewpoint, and the goofy Buddhist version is the view from the 'left hand' inside. But the point is that both views are correct, and this may be the first time I actually 'get' where he's going with the post metaphysics, and how to relate 'science' and 'religion'. I might intellectually understand the objective view, but the Buddhist version is just as useful here in practice, and might even be more so for certain practices.
When I discovered this practice, it wasn't through the external objective view. I don't think about sending out non-verbal cues. I really do tend to focus on sending my 'loving sleep energy' at him. Similarly, when I'm trying to calm myself, I don't tend to think about flooding my brain with Serotonin or whatever the appropriate brain chemical is. I focus on finding center, mindful breathing, etc. But here's the really exciting bit. I don't have to abandon my 'hard-nosed' scientific training. I don't have to abandon my objectivity. In fact, I'm better off with both.
This is very interesting indeed, because it effectively dismisses one the biggest issues I've had with 'religion', which is that it seems to require me to turn of by brain. Faith without evidence is the goal. Indeed evidence may only hurt you. This often seems to me to be the voice of religion, at least much of I've met that calls itself religion. And I have serious moral objections to that sort of dogmatic approach. What's so attractive about Wilber's approach is that it is one of injunction and response. Effectively it is something like a spiritual scientific method. Integral spiritual training should sound like 'try this: it works!'. And indeed, I've tried something and it does seem effective.
What's more, the objective understanding I have of it doesn't reduce its efficacy! This has been one of my stumbling blocks in the past, probably a leftover of flatland philosophy. If spirituality is all in the mind, then what is the point? If Buddhist lovingkindness doesn't exist in the 'real' world, then how does it help? I seemed to have a hang up on reality. But of course, 'cyberspace' doesn't really exist either, but it is an eminently useful thing in it's own realm. Lovingkindness probably does have external correlates, and they may be quite complicated, but internally, in the human mind, they manifest in a fairly intuitive way.
And here's the truly shocking bit: the external 'real' world may NOT be the primary motive causation! There are indeed correlations between internal and external worldspaces. I have tended, in the past, to assume that the external factors were the causal reality, and the internal factors were mere side effects. But the truth is, that I don't really have much of a basis for that bias. It is a well known scientific trap to equate correlation with causation. Perhaps the flow of causality flows both ways. And if so, then that opens the door to a great many possibilities.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment