Life is a swinging pendulum.
And/or, life is a juggling act between multiple plates that we are trying (or not trying) to juggle at the same time. The better we are at 'the art and science of living', the more plates we can juggle at the same time -- and still keep them all twirling in the air. When we make a mistake -- when we miss a plate -- the plate may twirl for a while on its own -- or your -- past momentum, but sooner or later it is going to stop twirling, and come crashing down to the ground. At that point, you will fully recognize that you missed a plate, and if you are not careful, if you spend too little or too much time focusing on the fallen plate on the ground, others still in the air may come crashing down with it.
Such is life. A 'double metaphor' of 'juggling plates' and/or a 'swinging pendulum'.
This is what I mean by life being 'multi-dialectical'. All these different plates -- and there are quite a few different ones: survival, health and wellness, family, children and parenting, friends, love and romance, contact, awareness, and intimacy, sensuality, sex and lust, work, money, business and economics, budgeting, politics, religion, fun and recreation, leisure and hobbies, nature, creativity, self-assertion and self-actualization (individuation), social sensitivity (empathy), community and altruism,
These are the 'juggled plates of life'.
Pay too much attention to your work life -- and your love life suffers.
Pay too much attention to your love life -- and your work life suffers.
Pay too much time with your mind in the sky -- and you lose your groundedness on earth.
Pay too much time grounded on earth -- and you lose your willingness and/or courage, and/or ability to fly high in the sky, to become more tomorrow than you were today.
Spend too much and you lose control of your budget. There is an East Indian saying that I heard from someone at work that goes something like this: 'Don't stretch your legs any further than your blanket can cover you.'
Save too much and you may never get the chance to enjoy what you have.
Live too extremely, and you are likely to die extremely.
Live too moderately and shyly, and you may never experience some of the greatest challenges, risks and rewards, and passions in life.
This is the swinging dialectic pendulum of life.
The Gestalt Therapists call it 'organismic self-regulation'.
You attend to each new stimulus as each new stimulus becomes dominant in your mind: 1. stimulus; 2. problem; 3. problem-solving. In Gestalt Therapy, they use fancier language: 1. 'gestalt(stimulus)-creation'; 2. 'gestalt(stimulus)-closure'.
This too is the pendulum of life: 1. Problem; 2. Problem-Solving. 3. Problem; 4. Problem-Solving; 5. Problem; 6. Problem-Solving...
This is the 'Cognitive-Gestalt' two stage formula for problem-solving or gestalt-closure -- an alternative to the Hegelian dialectic-triadic formula of: 1. thesis; 2. anti-thesis; 3. synthesis.
However, Fritz Perls -- like Freud and Jung and Melanie Klein before him -- was very much influenced by 'The Hegelian Dialectic'. The Hegelian Dialectic is the essence of all dialectic psychotherapies: Psychoanalysis, Jungian Psychology, Gestalt Therapy, Object Relations, Transactional Analysis, Psychodrama...
Righteous, Authoritative Topdog (Superego, Apollonian Ego): 'Do this!'
Overt Rebellious Underdog (Id, Dionysian Ego): 'I don't want to do that!'
Covert Rebellious Underdog (Id, Procrastinating Dionysian Ego): 'Yes, sir, I will do it later.'
Righteous, Authoritative Topdog: 'No, do it now!'
Overt Rebellious Underdog: 'Screw you!'
Covert, Sneaky, Procrastinating Underdog: 'Yeah sure....(and nothing changes...nothing gets done...)'
These are two more 'dialectic plates' of life -- 'adversaries in life, internalized within us, within our 'Split Psyche' which is basically a continuation of our 'Parent-Child' (Father-Son, Mother-Daughter) relationship...with only the names and the people changing...for example, our spouse taking the place of one of our 'righteous parents'...and us continuing the role of our 'overtly or covertly rebellious child'.
Our internal dialectic impasses -- and 'ego splits, alienations, or dissociations' are often continuations of childhood-parent impasses that got us nowhere -- left us in the same 'psychological position' as we are now -- with 'our righteous topdog' and our 'rebellious underdog' doing battle with each other, and more often than not, reaching a psychological impasse, like a corporation and a union, or a player's agent and a general manager, that cannot come to terms with each other. So they leave the 'bargaining table'.
When we leave the bargaining table within ourselves -- between two split ego-states (for example, our righteous topdog vs. our rebellious underdog or our Apollonian topodog vs. our Romantic Underdog...or our Perfectionistic Topdog and our 'On Strike' Underdog...nothing gets done, nothing gets accomplished...Either there is a stalemate, or it might be said, that our rebellious underdog 'wins' all stalemates because that means that when our rebellious underdog essentially tells (or doesn't tell but means it anyway) our righteous topdog to 'go fly a kite'...our righteous topdog cannot essentially 'fire' our rebellious underdog -- all he or she can do is essentially browbeat, torture with words and trash-talking, negative self-talk, our rebellious topdog into 'submission'...But this rarely works...This situation is a continuation of what Hegel called the 'master-slave' relationship where both are dependent on each other: the 'master' is dependent on the slave for 'action' (and oftentimes, has no talent or capability for getting the work done him or herself; and the 'slave' is dependent on the 'master' for 'leadership' but if this leadership is totalitarian, fascist, dictatorial, sadistic, verbally torturing -- then because of the undemocratic-dialectic nature of this relationship, the relationship is likely to collapse as most dictatorial relationships usually do.
The 'life-plate' or 'ego-state' that is missing is the 'maternal-paternal-nurturing-encouraging-supportive-reinforcing topdog' that is more likely to 'positively energize an otherwise immobile rebellious underdog'. The addition of the 'Nurturing Topdog' often 'breaks the impasse' of the toxic, dysfunctional relationship between the 'sadistic-righteous-rejecting topdog' and the 'anarchistic, sabotaging, passive-aggressive rebellious underdog'.
Two plates that had landed on the ground -- each because of their toxic relationship with the other -- are restored back to functionality, and back to spinning in the air again. Life is good.
I find it increasingly amazing how similarly the ancient Greeks (the founders of Western philosophy) and the ancient Chinese (the founders of Eastern Philosophy) were in their mythological-spiritual-philosophical thinking.
The ancient Greeks and Chinese philosophers (Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Lao Tse, The Han Philosophers...) all knew about 'juggling plates in the air'...they all knew about the many 'multi-dialectic-democatic, humanistic-existential challenges of life'.
Back in Ancient Greece and Ancient China -- more so but not entirely dissimilar to the situation right now -- the Ancient Greek and Chinese philosophers 'projected' their 'life-challenges' and 'internal ego-states' and 'righteous, narcissistic theses' into 'different Gods and Parts of The Universe'.
So for example, you had Thales of Miletus -- the first known Western philosopher who believed that all life originated from 'water'.
And then you had Anaximenes of Miletus who counter-argued that 'air' was the first building piece of life. Here is one of the first example of the Hegelian dialectic forumla of thesis, Thales' theory of the beginning of life (water); vs. anti-thesis Anaximenes theory of the beginning of life (air). But the early Western 'multi-dialectic does not stop here because you had Pythagoras -- the first 'mathematical rationalist' who claimed that everything originated with 'mathematics and numbers'. And you had Heraclitus claiming that everything originated with 'fire'. And you had Heraclitus claiming that everything is constantly changing -- that 'you cannot step into the same river twice because other waters are ever flowing onto you'. Conversely, you had Parmenides, another rationalist partly in the Pythagoras mold who had a huge influence on Plato -- and thus, the evolution of Western Philosophy -- that 'appearances are deceiving and illusionary'; that 'nothing ever changes', 'everything always stays the same' and we can know this only by reason and logic, not through our senses which bring us illusionary deception.
Then you had Anaxamander who was the first real 'dialectic philosopher', the first 'evolutionist' philosopher (some 2350 to 2400 years before Hegel and Darwin respectively), and the first 'Gestalt Therapist' some 2500 years before Fritz Perls.
Anaxamander (610BC to 546BC) was the first Western philosopher to get a grasp on the 'pendulum theory of life' of the idea of 'what goes around comes around', and of the idea that 'power is fleeting and that the subdued will re-organize, re-energize, and come back to conquer'. (These are not Anaxamander quotes but rather my summarizing his essential 'power and marginalization' philosophy.)
For example, again in my paraphrasing of Anaxamander's rather mystical words, 'the light will conquer the dark but only temporarily, what goes around comes around, the pendulum of life will swing, and cyclically the dark will come back from the shadows of the Apeiron and dominate the day as the day retreats into the shadows -- the 'shadows' or the 'background' of the Apeiron. Thus, we have 'dominating Gestalts' and 'submissive, background Gestalts' but everything is fleeting, changing, according the cycles of life -- the swinging pendulum.
Now over in China, arguably around this same time period as Anaxamander you had Lao Tse putting many of these ideas together into the 'I Ching' -- and what would eventually become 'Taoism' or 'Daoism'.
You have the appearance of the Eastern dialectic concepts of 'yin' (feminine energy) and 'yang' (masculine energy'...and again the idea of the 'swinging pendulum' and the idea -- similar to what Heraclitus had arrived at in the West -- of 'democratic, egalitarian, homeostatic dialectic balance'. With these ideas, not only do you have the beginning of Eastern Dialectic Philosophy but you also have the beginning of Eastern Medicine. The idea of 'balancing the body' with not too much 'yin' and not too much 'yang' but the right proportions of both. Philosophers like Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Hippocrates, and Lao Tse foreshadowed the work of Walter B. Cannon in his classic book on medicine: 'The Wisdom of The Body' (1932) as well as foreshadowing the work of Nietzche in 'The Birth of Tragedy' (The need for a 'balanced Apollonian-Dionysian lifestyle' before Nietzsche started to become a more one-sidedly 'Dionysian extremist' in his later life and work. And the idea of 'homeostatic (dialectic-democratic) balance' also entered the work of Freud, Jung, Berne, Perls, and many other dialectic psycho-theorists and therapists. In politics, you have to look at John Locke's 'separation of political powers' as an act of wise 'dialectical-democracy' meant to compensate for the inevitable phenomenon of 'one-sided human righteousness and narcissistic bias'.
This idea of 'homeostatic (dialectic-democratic) balance in the body' also affects me very personally because April 1st (yes, April Fool's day but this was no April Fool's joke...), I was diagnosed with cirrhosis in my liver. Cirrhosis is a very serious disease that needs to be taken very seriously -- or it can be lights out if the cirrhosis progresses and liver regresses in its many-fold daily functions.
The liver is like the Chief Executive Officer of the body with probably literally hundreds of daily functions from nullifying toxins before they circulate in the body, to helping to digest fats through bile storage and release, to producing and balancing hormones, to producing and balancing cholesterol levels, to producing and helping to balance glucose levels, to helping with the stability and functionality of the immune system...and this is just off the top of my head...
My cholesterol levels are also too high -- I am not sure how high they are because I have not taken a cholesterol test yet -- but this too is a serious 'red danger flag' relative to a real and serious health risk. The husband of a friend of mine didn't take this risk seriously enough -- and address this very serious problem fast enough -- and he died of a heart attack just after New Years a couple of years ago. He was 49 years old when he died. The arteries to his heart were totally clogged. My dad had the main artery up his neck -- the carteroid artery? -- surgically cleaned out. It too was almost totally clogged. At 80 years old, he is probably more physically active than I am on a day to day basis. 'Physical exercise' is another one of those 'juggling plates' that we all need to take seriously before some health issue attached to this plate -- crashes to the floor.
Regarding the liver, and a 'crude but simple' interpretation of the influence of the concepts of 'yin' and 'yang' on the beginning -- and present day -- Eastern medicine, if the liver is 'too hot', if there is too much 'fire' (Heraclitus) in the liver, too much 'yang' in the liver, then this 'inflammation', this 'fire' needs to be 'put out' or 'compensated for' by the ingestion of 'water', 'water', and more 'water' until the fire is extinguished. Believe me, I have had to do this -- resort to a diet exclusively of water, soya milk, soups, and fruits and veggies to sooth my 'inflamed liver'. Too much 'yang' in the liver -- then you have to compensate with 'yin' foods and beverages to 'put out the fire'. This is essentially no different than having to drink water with 'hot peppers' or 'hot sauce'. 'Theromogenics' -- like cayenne, ginger, hot peppers, hawthorne, gingko biloba...all 'heat the body up', they all open up the arteries -- and 'water' cools the body back down.
In contrast, 'coffee' -- or actually 'caffeine' -- is a 'sneaky, dangerous thermogenic'. Yes, it heats the body up, speeds your adrenaline metabolism up, and in so doing, gives you an 'energy high' but caffeine actually 'constricts' the arteries rather than 'opening them up', and as such can present a health hazard to all of us, if overindulged in, particularly to potential heart attack or stroke victims, and/or to people with high cholesterol readings because the worst thing that such a person can possibly want is a combination of 'clogged arteries' and 'constricted arteries' caused by caffeine usage. This is 'double trouble' -- a double health hazard.
A couple of years ago I was having breakfast with my parents at a restaurant. I ordered eggs benedict and a coffee -- a very bad combination for potential heart attack or stroke victims. I started to drink my coffee and my head started to spin. I started getting dizzy and almost passed out -- the only time that has happened in my life. My parents rushed me to the hospital.
I don't know whether the bacon was bad in my peameal bacon, whether my liver and/or arteries were in a 'red flag' danger zone, or whatever other extenuating factors may have been at work that morning. But I threw up the eggs benedict in the emergency ward, stabilized in the hospital for an hour or two, and then went home with my parents. That was that -- a type of event that has not repeated itself but perhaps my first serious red warning flag of high cholesterol levels clogging my arteries and the complicating factor of coffee 'constricting my arteries' to further exasperate the already dangerous situation. Or maybe it was something else. Theories are theories but that is the best one I can come up with 3 or 4 years after the fact.
The older we get, the more difficult it gets to 'balance all the different plates' within the body -- all the different organs and the homeostatic-dialectic-balancing functions -- hundreds if not thousands of them -- that go on between all these different organs.
I look at my mother who is just coming off a stroke this past winter. She is diabetic which is a very tough 'homeostatic problem' to deal with -- balancing sugar levels. After the stroke, her doctors put her on about 10 or 15 similar and/or different pills, maybe more. Pills for diabetes. Pills for the heart. Pills for high cholesterol levels. I'm probably missing some. Whether it is still the after-effect of her stroke, or all of these different pills have robbed her of about 80 percent of her 'life-energy', that is a matter of potential debate.
What is not a matter of debate is that there are many, many 'homeostatic-dialectic-democratic functions' being conducted in our bodies each and every day -- most of which we are not even aware of until something goes wrong.
Again, it is the 'swinging pendulum' idea. I say 'dialectic-democratic-homeostatic functions' indicating the idea that there needs to be a 'precarious egalitarian-democratic balance between competing polar forces and extremes'. This idea applies to each and every aspect of man's existence -- from biology to biochemistry to medicine to psychology to psychotherapy to philosophy to politics to religion...
We spend too much time juggling one particular plate in life -- and another plate, its polar opposite -- comes crashing down to the ground.
Such is the homeostatically-oriented 'juggling of different life plates' -- and the consequent swinging of the 'pendulum of life -- and death'.
-- dgb, July 16th, 2009.
David Gordon Bain,
Democracy Goes Beyond Narcissism...
Dialectic-Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
Are still in process...
.................................................................................
Walter Bradford Cannon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Walter Bradford Cannon
Walter Bradford Cannon at Harvard.
Walter Bradford Cannon at Harvard.
Born October 19, 1871
Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin
Died October 19, 1945
Nationality American
Fields physiology
Institutions Harvard Medical School
Known for homeostasis
fight or flight
X rays
Cannon-Bard theory
Walter Bradford Cannon (October 19, 1871 – October 19, 1945) was an American physiologist, Professor and chairman of the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School, who developed the concept of homeostasis, and popularized it in his book The Wisdom of the Body, published in 1932 by W. W. Norton, New York.
Contents
* 1 Biography
* 2 Work
o 2.1 Scientific contributions
* 3 Publication
* 4 References
* 5 Further reading
* 6 External links
Biography
Walter Cannon was born in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in 1871. In his autobiography The Way of an Investigator, Cannon counts himself among the descendents of Jacques de Noyon. His Calvinist family was intellectually active, including readings from James Martineau, John Fiske (philosopher), and James Freeman Clarke. Cannon's curiosity also lead him to Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall, George Henry Lewes, and William Kingdon Clifford.[1] A high school teacher, Mary Jeannette Newson, became his mentor. "Miss May" Newson motivated and helped him take his academic skills to Harvard University.[2] Attracted to the biological sciences as an undergraduate, Cannon began working in Bowditch's laboratory as a first-year student at Harvard Medical School in 1896.[3] In 1900 he received his medical degree.
Cannon kept working in Harvard as an instructor in the Department of Physiology in 1900. From 1906 until 1942 he was Higginson Professor and chairman of the of the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School.
He was President of the American Physiological Society from 1914 to 1916.
He was married to Cornelia James Cannon, a best-selling author.[4] The couple had five children. One son was Dr. Bradford Cannon, a military plastic surgeon and radiation researcher. The daughters are Wilma Cannon Fairbank, Linda Cannon Burgess, Helen Cannon Bond and Marian Cannon Schlesinger, a painter and author living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Walter Cannon died in 1945 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Work
Walter Cannon began his career in science as a Harvard undergraduate in the year 1896. Henry Pickering Bowditch, who had worked with Claude Bernard, directed the laboratory in physiology at Harvard. Here Cannon began his research: he used the newly discovered X rays to study the mechanism of swallowing and the motility of the stomach. He demonstrated deglutition in a goose at the APS meeting in December 1896 and published his first paper on this research in the first issue of the American Journal of Physiology in January 1898.[3]
In 1945 Cannon summarized his career in physiology by describing his focus at different ages:[5]
* Age 26 - 40: digestion and the bismuth meal
* Age 40 - 46: bodily effects of emotional excitement
* Age 46 - 51: wound shock investigations
* Age 51 - 59: stable states of the organism
* Age 59 - 68: chemical mediation of nerve impulses (collaboration with Arturo Rosenblueth)
* Age 68 + : chemical sensitivity of nerve-isolated organs
Scientific contributions
Use of salts of heavy metals in X-Rays
He was one of the first researchers to mix salts of heavy metals (including bismuth subnitrate, bismuth oxychloride, and barium sulfate) into foodstuffs in order to improve the contrast of X-ray images of the digestive tract. The barium meal is a modern derivative of this research.
Fight or flight
In 1915, he coined the term fight or flight to describe an animal's response to threats (Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage: An Account of Recent Researches into the Function of Emotional Excitement, Appleton, New York, 1915).
Homeostasis
He developed the concept of homeostasis from the earlier idea of Claude Bernard of milieu interieur, and popularized it in his book The Wisdom of the Body,1932. Cannon presented four tentative propositions to describe the general features of homeostasis:
1. Constancy in an open system, such as our bodies represent, requires mechanisms that act to maintain this constancy. Cannon based this proposition on insights into the ways by which steady states such as glucose concentrations, body temperature and acid-base balance were regulated.
2. Steady-state conditions require that any tendency toward change automatically meets with factors that resist change. An increase in blood sugar results in thirst as the body attempts to dilute the concentration of sugar in the extracellular fluid.
3. The regulating system that determines the homeostatic state consists of a number of cooperating mechanisms acting simultaneously or successively. Blood sugar is regulated by insulin, glucagons, and other hormones that control its release from the liver or its uptake by the tissues.
4. Homeostasis does not occur by chance, but is the result of organized self-government.
Cannon-Bard theory
Cannon developed the Cannon-Bard theory with physiologist Philip Bard to try to explain why people feel emotions first and then act upon them.
Dry mouth
He put forward the Dry Mouth Hypothesis, stating that people get thirsty because their mouth gets dry. He did an experiment on two dogs. He cut their throats and inserted a small tube. Any water swallowed would go through their mouths and out by the tube, never reaching the stomach. He found out that these dogs would lap up the same amount of water as control dogs
Publication
Cannon wrote several books and articles.
* 1910, A Laboratory Course in Physiology
* 1911, The Mechanical Factors of Digestion
* 1915, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage
* 1923, Traumatic Shock
* 1932, The Wisdom of the Body
* 1936, Digestion and Health
* 1937, Autonomic Neuro-effector Systems, with Arturo Rosenblueth
* 1945, The Way of an Investigator
References
1. ^ Way of an Investigator, pp. 16-7
2. ^ Saul Benison, A. Clifford Barger, Elin L. Wolfe (1987) Walter B. Cannon: the Life and Times of a Young Scientist. pp.16-32
3. ^ a b 6th APS President at the American Physiological Society
4. ^ Although not mountaineers, during their honeymoon the couple were the first, on July 19, 1901, to reach the summit of the unclimbed southwest peak (2657 m or 8716 ft) of Goat Mountain, between Lake McDonald and Logan Pass in what is now Glacier National Park. The peak was subsequently named Mount Cannon by the United States Geological Survey [1].
5. ^ On page 218 of his book The Way of an Investigator,
Further reading
* Saul Benison, A. Clifford Barger, Elin L. Wolfe (1987) Walter B. Cannon: the Life and Times of a Young Scientist, [ISBN 0674945808].
* Elin L. Wolfe, A. Clifford Barger, Saul Benison (2000) Walter B. Cannon, Science and Society, [ISBN 0674002512].
* Walter Bradford Cannon: Reflections on the Man and His Contributions, International Journal of Stress Management, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1994
* Marian Cannon Schlesinger, Snatched from Oblivion: A Cambridge Memoir, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979
External links
* 6th APS President at the American Physiological Society
* Walter Bradford Cannon: Experimental Physiologist, a biographical article by Edric Lescouflair, dated 2003
* Chapter 9 of Explorers of the body, by Steven Lehrer (contains information about X ray experiments)
Subfields
Polycontexturality · Second-order cybernetics · Catastrophe theory · Connectionism · Control theory · Decision theory · Information theory · Semiotics · Synergetics · Biological cybernetics · Biosemiotics · Biomedical cybernetics · Biorobotics · Computational neuroscience · Homeostasis · Management cybernetics · Medical cybernetics · New Cybernetics · Neuro cybernetics · Sociocybernetics · Emergence · Artificial intelligence
Cyberneticists
Igor Aleksander · William Ross Ashby · Anthony Stafford Beer · Claude Bernard · Ludwig von Bertalanffy · Valentin Braitenberg · Gordon S. Brown · Walter Bradford Cannon · Heinz von Foerster · Charles François · Jay Wright Forrester · Buckminster Fuller · Ernst von Glasersfeld · Francis Heylighen · Erich von Holst · Cliff Joslyn · Stuart Kauffman · Sergei P. Kurdyumov · Niklas Luhmann · Warren McCulloch · Humberto Maturana · Talcott Parsons · Gordon Pask · Walter Pitts · Alfred Radcliffe-Brown · Robert Trappl · Valentin Turchin · Jakob von Uexküll · Francisco Varela · Frederic Vester · Charles Geoffrey Vickers · Stuart Umpleby · John N. Warfield · Kevin Warwick · Norbert Wiener
