Systems in our Life – Entanglement and Success

How to translate personal experiences? Many philosophers and poets were following that question in history… That question also comes to my mind when I try to describe the method of the Systemic/Family Constellation – to people who never experienced it.

Words are beautiful tools (could we even imagine our existence without verbal communication?) but if they dominate our thinking and our expressions to the world, we lose something important; something existing beyond words but still so meaningful.

Salvador Dali art is an example of attempt to cross a barrier between a linear (thinking, intellectual) and non-linear (imagination, figurative) mind ways of processing and communicating.

Love, passion, dream – we share a broad understanding of these complex internal states of our psyche – but still they might carry very different meanings for different people.     What if I’d try to talk to someone about what happened in my picturesque, surrealistic dream? That’s the basic difficulty in talking about internal experiences. I can talk about my experience of love but my verbal description of that experience would never reflect a full content of what I actually experience.

Phenomenology as a way of exploring the structure of subjective experience and consciousness is a necessary method of exploration of internal experience.  If science (or our personal reasoning) ignores internal experiences – science (and reasoning) remains in denial of  reality: a dream is a real fact as it happened to an individual in one’s internal experience.

Collusive, historical but still ruling science – the Positivistic formula (commonly presented as necessity of repetition of specific reactions to give them a go in the science) reduces a vast of humanology. We are unique as humans, each of us; we are able to share part of what we experience but not everything – as an internal experience gives always a unique outcome to an individual. The view of a mountain you look at – is unique; and difficult to translate to words, especially if you feel amusement of that view in your heart.

So called “evidence based” approaches in human sciences (like in psychology and sociology) are promoted not because they really work in solving problems!!! They are just extractable pieces of personal experience, “minced” to fit to statistical correctness. “Evidence based” means nothing but “statistically measured” – which is applicable to some isolated segments of human psyche (and it could be sometimes useful to search these segments; but it’s not enough to complete the description of human’s experience).

I welcome forerunners of more holistic approaches in science like recent findings in psycho-neuroscience; there is evidence of physical development of the operational (decision center) part of the adult brain after regular mindfulness meditation – thanks of advanced technology of registering brain functioning. Recently I read about some statistics confirming that praying helps in healing. Well, all that was known for thousand years in humans’ experiences but was rejected by positivistically oriented science. Conclusion? Seems obvious: if science rejects something from human experience, probably that is because science doesn’t know yet how to measure it.

What picture comes to your mind when I say:         Your Mother?…

Hania Gorski