AWARENESS AND AFFECTIVE CONVERSION
As puzzling as it may sound, Anthony de Mello says that "awareness is an effortless activity" (The Way to Love (Doubleday, 1992, page 147; originally published in 1991 in India as Call to Love). According to Anthony de Mello, 'non-judgmental awareness alone heals and changes and makes one grow. But in its own way and at its own time" (page 146; also see pages 8, 42-43, 53, 57, 62, 84).
We should note here that psychotherapists of different schools of thought about psychological theory and about how to approach psychotherapy typically approach clients with an attitude of unconditional positive regard to use Carl Rogers' expression, which involves what Anthony de Mello refers to as non-judgmental awareness on the psychotherapist's part. But he is referring to the client learning how to practice non-judgmental awareness of himself or herself.
Now, it strikes me that what Anthony de Mello refers to as "effortless awareness" is involved in experiences of nature mysticism. People do not make an effort to experience nature mysticism -- it just happens to them. So it is an effortless experience for them. But certain people may deliberately open themselves to the possible experience of nature mysticism through the practice of contemplative prayer. In short, contemplation involves something like the practice of mindfulness as a way to open oneself to the possible experience of nature mysticism. In Jesuit parlance, Jesuits are supposed to be contemplatives in action -- that is, they are supposed to practice contemplation in prayer, but then proceed to action in their daily lives. In any event, the experience of nature mysticism is widely reported cross-culturally. But the experience of nature mysticism shows us that what C. G. Jung and his followers refer to as feeling (and the feeling function), which they distinguish from emotional affect, is a deep part of the universal human psyche.
Because we tend to like to name our subjective experiences to the best of our abilities, I would suggest that we name the subjective experience involved in nature mysticism as the experience of tao. I will discuss tao further later in the present essay.
Now, in the self-help book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (Azure Coyote Book, 2013), the American psychotherapist Pete Walker discusses the affective dimension in connection with complex PTSD. His self-help book is an awesome achievement in articulate psychoanalytic explanation. Like Anthony de Mello, Pete Walker also commends inner affective awareness (pages 238 and 240). First, in general, he claims that feeling is deeper than and distinct from emoting. Then he makes the following observations: "Feeling 'occurs' when we direct our attention to an emotionally or physically painful state, and surrender to this experience without resistance. When we relax acceptingly into our pain, we can learn to gently absorb it into our experience. Feeling then functions as if our awareness is a solvent that dissolves and metabolizes the affect, energy and sensations of our emotions" (page 238).
On the next page, he continues by saying the following: "The technique of focusing your awareness on physical sensations in your body can help you become more proficient at the practice of 'feeling.' With enough practice, paying attention to tightness in your face, throat, heart, or belly area brings feelings into awareness, where they can be felt through [his emphasis]. However, in your early experiences of focusing on sensations, feeling may come up so strongly that you will benefit from allowing yourself to emote them" -- and perhaps also by allowing yourself to express your emoting through verbal ventilation (page 239).
As he goes on to delineate further how this process develops, he claims that certain painful feelings "will also be digested and worked through purely with the solvent of awareness" (page 240).
According to both Anthony de Mello's account of awareness and Pete Walker's account of awareness, the ordinary practice of awareness fostered by Jesuit spirituality could have contributed to Lonergan's experience of affective conversion. In the book The Inner Experience of Law: A Jurisprudence of Subjectivity (Catholic University of America Press, 1988), David Granfield, a Benedictine priest and professor of law at the Catholic University of America, works with Lonergan's framework of thought. David Granfield also distinguishes feelings from emotions (affect). What he refers to as emotion is equivalent to what Anthony de Mello refers to as worldly feelings, which he distinguishes from soul feelings.
PETE WALKER'S TESTIMONY
One of the greatest strengths of Pete Walker's self-help book is that he makes it abundantly clear that emotional recovery, which Lonergan refers to as affective conversion, is an ongoing recovery process. Even though Lonergan refers to affective conversion, there is no good reason to think that he himself experienced the ne plus ultra of affective conversion. He almost certainly did not.
However, St. Ignatius Loyola, S.J., the founder of the Jesuits, may have come close to experiencing the ne plus ultra of affective conversion, and so have Anthony de Mello and Pete Walker. Moreover, as a spiritual director, St. Ignatius Loyola most likely engaged in what Pete Walker refers to as a relational approach with the individual persons he was working with in spiritual direction.
St. Ignatius Loyola compiled the book of instructions for engaging in guided imagistic meditations that is known as the Spiritual Exercises -- because it contains instructions for spiritual exercises that worked for him. In other words, his instructions are based on his own personal experiences in his own spiritual quest, just as Pete Walker's explanations and instructions in his self-help book about complex PTSD are based on his own personal experiences in his own psychological quest of recovery -- and on his work as a psychotherapist trying to help other victims of complex PTSD in their recovery work. Basically, Jesuit spirituality strikes me as a form of self-help. In effect, George T. Tade hints at this in his article "The Spiritual Exercises [of St. Ignatius Loyola]: A Method of Self-Persuasion" in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, volume 43 (1957): pages 383-389.
This brings me to the American Jesuit theologian Robert M. Doran's account of psychic conversion as a process that emerges after the experiences of intellectual, moral, religious, and affective conversion. I have no doubt that St. Ignatius Loyola experienced psychic conversion. As a matter of fact, it strikes me that psychic conversion emerges most decisively after a certain measure of affective conversion. Because Pete Walker works with the contrast of the superego versus the healthy ego, I would say that what he refers to as the emerging healthy ego is equivalent to what Doran refers to as psychic conversion. (Pete Walker's account of the superego-self versus the healthy-ego-self is far too complicated for me to briefly describe here -- and so is Lonergan's account of intellectual conversion. Suffice it to say that the gradual deconstruction of the superego-self and the gradual emergence of the healthy-ego-self do indeed truly involve a cognitive dimension -- as well as an affective dimension.)
Now, C. G. Jung and his followers distinguish the healthy-ego-self and ego-consciousness from the inner archetypal Self (I capitalize this term to signal that it is an archetype in the person's psyche). But they claim that the optimally healthy-ego-self stands in an inner relationship with archetypal Self. As Pete Walker notes (pages 25, 27), the young child's superego is formed around his or her internalization of the parents. As the young child internalizes impressions of his or her mother (or mother figure) and father (or father-figure), those internalized impressions make up the young child superego. As Pete Walker sees it, the child then devotes his or her life to recovering from his or her superego interjects, so that the child's healthy ego may emerge. But we should note that the child's internalization of impressions of the mother (or mother-figure) and the father (or father figure) form around archetypes in the child's psyche -- the mother archetype and the father archetype.
Now, I do want to interject a note of caution here. Individual persons may set out on a quest for emotional recovery and affective conversion, and perhaps even for psychic conversion. But emotional recovery and affective conversion are not likely to emerge as widespread societal trends in the near future. Perhaps the forms of cognitive awareness that Lavelle and Ong and Lonergan and McLuhan will not become widespread societal trends in the near future either. But the forms of cognitive awareness that Ong and others discuss have a far greater likelihood of influencing a significant number of well-educated people, than the forms of emotional recovery and affective conversion do in the near future.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
