What you will find in this section
These pages bring together the key arguments about emotional intelligence, systems sensibility, and lived reality - the narrative structure of personal experience. These govern the new directions we are exploring - in theory and practice - on the site as a whole. Learn how the nineteenth-century novelists anticipated our new twenty-first century scientific understanding of the intricate web of personal life. We explore the concepts of felt sense, and felt reality - which is the subtle cognitive intelligence of the body. George Eliot, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf are three of our guides in this quest for a truly cybernetic intelligence.
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Who am I?>
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I am Michael Roth, the author of all
the material on this site. While training as a medical doctor, I was
also an alumnus at the famed AntiUniversity of London (1968-1969), and
became involved with the alternative psychiatry movement in that era
and later.
I worked and studied with the existential psycho-analyst
R.D.Laing, and was a founder-member of the Arbours Association
(London), which provides alternative care for persons diagnosed with
severe mental illness.
My research path has taken me into spheres of
philosophy, social politics, linguistics and anthropology - whilst I
have continued to seek out a genuine way of relating to other human
beings in the troubled milieux of psychiatry, communal living, and
twentieth and twenty-first century social and cultural instability.
I have been consistently inter-disciplinary in all of my
reading and exploration, and the personal and philosophical insights to
which this has given rise are almost always outside the prevailing
classifications - or accepted lists of subjects.
The following authors are they whose work I have been
most deeply occupied with, at different times in my life. This has
often entailed exploring what the actual world feels like, within the
patterns and definitions of life offered by these people. I have also
written extensively, and often critically, about many of them.
Philosophy
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Martin Buber
- Lao Ze
- St Matthew
- St Mark
- St Luke
- St John
- Rudolf Bultmann
- Paul Ricoeur
- Richard Rorty
- Robert Pirsig
- Donald Davidson
- Jacques Derrida
- Benedetto Croce
- Charles Peirce
- John Dewey
- A.N.Whitehead
- J.H.Randall
- Justus Buchler
- Martha Nussbaum
Biology, Physiology, Ethology and
Cybernetics
Anthropology
- Mary Douglas
- Gregory Bateson
- Milton Ericson
- R.D.Laing
- David Cooper
- Clifford Geertz
- Victor Turner
Virtual Reality
Psychology
- Eugene Gendlin
- Arnold Mindell
- M. Scott Peck
I am the foremost exponent of Charlotte M. Bach's
ground-breaking theories of emergent evolution, described in my A Bolt From the Bleeding Sky
(Dielectric Publications, London, 1984). I continue to work as a
psychiatrist and as a researcher into holistic methods of facilitating
social change. This used to include facilitation and training sponsored by the
organization, Community
Building in Britain which developed and disseminated the
work of the holistic psychiatrist M. Scott Peck through the 90s and noughties.
I am also involved in an exploratory research group
seeking to fuse poetic, practical and fantastical modes of action to
create significant cultural/political interventions in the here and now.
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The Pattern of Life:
personal, emotional, relational
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In this section we shall do some gentle
unraveling of the complex structure of everyday living. We aim to
uncover some of the hidden pattern through which our appreciation of
the world is organised. We want to retain a sense of the whole pattern,
at the same time as we start to explore how the different elements work
together to create the whole. This is also to encourage us in the
direction of a different engagement, with the simplicity and with the
complexity of life.
A key principle is that our felt engagement - everything that
we feel and sense in our bodies, in respect of the immediate situation
- is of central importance to our actual orientation and engagement in
the world. There is an important contrast between this, and the
approaches that have been named: "emotional intelligence" and
"emotional literacy". We are making an approach to the
landscape of lived reality that takes continuous account of what our
feelings are revealing about the world, and about ourselves
in the very moment of their upsurge as a feeling in us. This
is to highlight the intricate relationship in real time, between fact,
feeling and action. (I speak of a web of fact, feeling and
action, in order to bring out the central pivotal importance of this
relationship.)
Lived reality will always be the central hub of our theory and
practice. This means that any reference to other levels - levels more
conjectural or abstract - is to be understood, illustrated and made
sense of, by checking back with lived reality. We will not
find reason to distort our experience, put it in brackets, or explain
it away - for the sake of the theoretical frame. All of the theoretical
aspects are intended to serve and to illuminate our actual life - and
we shall beware of any tendency to exploit our life in order to feed
our theory.
There is a great deal of scientific and spiritual exploration which is
undertaken for the sheer playfulness, curiosity, or the drive to
discover new realms of endeavour. Much of this takes us away from the
immediacy of the here and now, and from our living relationships with
other beings - but I think it, too, is an expression of the
restlessness and vigour of the human spirit. So I do not want to
downgrade it or deny its importance or validity.
The enterprise that is pre-figured in these pages here - though
certainly fueled by my own restless and exploratory spirit - is in a
sense far narrower than the above. It has been subjected to a
particular discipline: that which I have evolved for my own life, in
the quest to restore the sense of immediacy, life and human
connection - where I have often felt it to be fragile, weakened or
under serious threat. It might be true to say that I have constantly
been seeking out ways to render my own existence livable.
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In other words, the insistence on connecting everything back to lived
reality has been something of a necessity for me. I learned to do it,
because other pathways always seemed to lead towards blight and
suffocation of my life energy. What started, then, as a kind of
compulsion, I have steadily re-fashioned over the years: into a
theoretical and practical policy. I have slowly gathered together the
philosophy, the theory and the practice which help me to understand how
this policy works and what makes it valid. I am also predicting that it
will turn out to be the needful strategy for the future - for some others at least -
equally as much as for myself.
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© all content: copyright reserved,
Michael Roth, March 2009
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