What you will find
in this section
Our concepts of systems sensibility
and systems layers allow and invites grounded relationship between real
human beings. This framework is genuinely open to the detail of lived
reality and leads to a heightened level of emotional honesty in
relationship. Understanding that we live and move within multiple
layers of reality, and that the logic of life is subject to these
layers, we are better able to do justice to all of them.
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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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Systems
Sensibility
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The question of systems - and of
systems layers - permeates every corner of this web-site. It is
integral to all the descriptions you will find here - and to the
engagement with the world, which they express. This is part of the
reason why there is no one single route-map through these pages; the
links at the top of the page are merely one set of suggestions, and any
one page may be reached through a variety of alternative routes. This
is both a consequence and a reflection of the rich cross-linkages
between the different profiles of reality I am trying to capture here.
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There are many occasions where there
is a
dominant focus in the moment, and we have no sense of any systems
layers in the background. According to the maps and guidelines which
unfold in these web pages, however, we recognize that any given focus -
however much it dominates our awareness - is but a single layer
in a complex, layered reality. Any long-term engagement needs to engage
the other systems layers, as well as the layer in focus, in order to be
effective and sustainable. We will need to learn when it is enough for
our systems sensibility to rest in the background, and when we need to
bring other layers - hitherto implicit and un-thematised in our present
time awareness - into the foreground focus of our attention.
So it is, that our emerging method comes from the meeting of ancient
practices such as shamanic ecstasy and the Chinese dao - which have
strong undercurrents of systems sensibility in their own right - with
the modern incarnations of the same sensibility: cybernetics,
neuro-lingistic programming, process psychology and cultural theory.
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© all content: copyright reserved,
Michael
Roth, March 2009
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