Origin of the Centred Self?

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Chapter  1:  A World View

Chapter  2:  Theorists and Philosophers

Chapter  3:  In the Beginning

Chapter  4:  Origin of the Centred Self

Chapter  5:  So What Then?

Chapter  6:  The Bible as a Thesis—Part 1

Chapter  7:  The Bible as a Thesis—Part 2

Chapter  8:  Good Governance and Definitions

Chapter  9:  Responsibility and Accountability

Chapter  10:  The Future Dictated or Predicted?

Chapter  11:  So What?

Chapter  12:  And So?

Dedication

To Ross, our four children and their friends.

Acknowledgements

The introductions to major philosophers and theorists given by my supervisors, Professor Lawrence Angus, Professor Marilyn Fleer and Dr Jill Brown, during my doctor of philosophy candidature have been invaluable. I especially appreciate the spontaneous discussions and reflections Jill so warmly and capably encouraged. Without this background, this book would never have event uated.

Many thanks are due to friends and colleagues who have listened, commented, challenged and journeyed with me as I’ve explored and wrestled with these themes and concepts.

Nathan Brown, Dr Bruce Manners and Clifford Goldstein are owed special thanks for thoughtful suggestions, patient direction, and thorough editing. Anne Razel and the Xlibris team have ensured this book’s publication. Thank-you.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, the boys for their perspectives and challenges, and especially Ross for his patience and support throughout this project. My daughter Kym is owed a very special thank-you for her assistance with technical puzzles and her artistic work on the cover—the product of many versions—in our attempts to develop a suitable design reflecting key ideas and concepts developed in this book.

CHAPTER 1

A World View

As a representative for a university teacher education program, I had just observed a young man teach a group of Asian Year 11 students taking English as a second-language class. Luke had done an excellent job of warmly and inclusively settling his students into their learning experience. I carefully outlined the positive approaches he had taken. His comments back to me, however, reflected a sense of his own inadequacy with his teaching methods. Worse, his comments sounded as if this was his attitude to life in general. I decided in order for him to accept himself more holistically it would be good if I could challenge this way of thinking at a deeper level.

‘Can I share how I think the world works?’ I asked.

‘Sure!’ Luke replied.

I turned over to a clean piece of paper and wrote:

‘We can be judged or held accountable,’ I started saying, ‘only for the wisdom we have. Consequences follow the decisions we make, right? We also live best when we have an attitude of selflessness. Choices/consequences are dependent on the existence of the universal principle of cause and effect.’

I then wrote four words (responsibility, autonomy, relationship, and selflessness) underneath these words and then continued, ‘We can summarise these words a second time and come up with responsibility, autonomy, relationship, and selflessness. This means that we, as human beings, are all responsible, autonomous, relational, and selfless and function best when we live and function from that perspective.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

‘Now watch this!’

After drawing a strong line under the previous words I had written, I placed two headings beside each other—subjective and objective.

‘When we make good decisions,’ I continued, ‘we will assess as many cause and effect factors we can and then make a decision based on what we’ve explored. The outcome should be truth based, freeing, and contribute to good living. On the other hand, if we ignore that our choices have consequences or ignore the fact that objective reality should inform our decisions, where do we go and on what basis do we make decisions?’

He responded after a moment of reflection, ‘We make decisions from within our subjective state.’

‘Right. And when we make decisions, all the while ignoring the fact that our choices have genuine and objective outcomes, we go through a process of making our decisions within our own subjective thoughts, which are often disconnected from reality. And decisions based on false premises can ruin our lives. All of this will contribute to spiralling and implosive events that are destructive and that inevitably lead to death.’

‘Wow,’ he said, ‘that’s kind of deep. Can I keep that piece of paper?’

Table 1.2

It is deep for sure.

At the same time, while reviewing the way we seek to understand the meaning of life, we discovered both of us had recently had an experience that filled us with the sense of life’s meaninglessness. We had both recently buried young friends. His best friend had lost an eighteen-year-old sister to a seizure the previous Friday. He was upset and unsure of what or how to react to this tragedy. I told him about a former high-achieving, secondary school, legal studies student of mine who had committed suicide eight months earlier. She had sought medical help on a number of occasions for depression but had not been taken seriously. The senseless death of both of these two young lives made us pause to reflect on the seeming pointlessness and meaninglessness of life and death.

‘You know, many people turn to Buddhism for the answers to these kinds of things,’ I said.

‘I know because that is where I’m going to try and find answers,’ Luke said right back.

‘I’m going to Christianity to try and find mine. In fact, I am going to write a book about all this and what I find.’

‘Please,’ he said, ‘when it gets done, I definitely want a copy.’

This whole conversation had taken about fifteen minutes. Total strangers prior to this meeting, we went our separate ways connected by grief, our questions, and unspoken deep reflection.

What follows is the promised book about how I read the Bible as an explanation for understanding who we are, what has gone wrong in our world, and our struggle to make meaning of the apparent meaninglessness of life.

I have found some helpful answers. I hope you find them helpful too.

CHAPTER 2

Theorists and Philosophers

When attempting to understand who we are, how we become who we are, and what truth is, we must understand the nature of our ‘frames of reference’. What is a ‘frame of reference’? The following story helps ex plain.

A professor in the 1920s challenged the beliefs of a few Christian students in his class about the existence of God. He argued on the premise that all scientific evidence should be based on direct sensory evidence. One student responded with his own set of questions. He started by asking if there was such a thing as cold, to which the professor happily exclaimed, ‘Of course.’

The student responded with a ‘No, there isn’t. Cold is just the absence of heat.’ He then asked, ‘Is there such a thing as dark?’

‘Of course,’ came the professor’s slightly hesitant reply.

Again the student responded, ‘No, there isn’t. Darkness is just the absence of light.’ Continuing the line of thinking, he pointed out that evil was only the absence of good and that death was only the absence of life. In a final challenge to the professor, the student asked the other students if anyone had seen, touched, tasted, smelt, or heard (as direct sensory evidence and the basis for scientific thinking) the professor’s brain. The professor with a sheepish grin slowly admitted there were occasions when one needed to accept truth as a matter of faith based on secondary or more indirect information.¹

The student used a materialistic ‘frame of reference’, arguing for the existence of these unseen things from a purely materialistic perspective. While there are various versions and nuances in materialist philosophy, our meaning of materialism here refers to the position that all reality is composed of matter and understandable natural laws, and these alone are of primary significance when attempting to understand the world and human identity.² This position is in contrast to the notion of idealism or dualism, which assumes that the mind or soul exist above and beyond the material nature of our universe.

In a materialist universe, humans would be explainable as purely material substances without a separate or detachable ‘soul’, meaning everything about us and about who we are would be explained by understanding all those knowable factors surrounding our lives.

One theorist using this frame of reference was Vygotsky,³ a Russian psychologist and theorist of the early 1900s, who argued that this frame of reference requires us to consider a number of principles.

To begin, we need to accept our complex wholeness. Vygotsky uses the example of water to explain the importance of thinking in terms of our complex wholeness. We do not understand the qualities of water by understanding the properties of its two core elements, hydrogen and oxygen, but by understanding the qualities of the final product itself. So it is with our human nature. In order to understand who we are and how we become who we are, we need to understand our ‘complex wholeness’ through the complex nature of our humanness, not just the biological parts. Plus, we need to recognise the relationships we share with the world around us. Our material, biological, historical, cultural, and social qualities and environments are part and parcel of our complex wholeness. Not one of these qualities can be exclusively considered in isolation to any other quality.⁴

One of the core questions in psychology during the early 1900s—and one that continues to puzzle theorists today—is how human beings develop the ability to think and make meaning or develop what can be referred to as ‘higher-order thinking’. Information we process and receive through our senses of smell, taste, touch, sight, sound, and bodily functions may contribute to our perceptions of our world, but it does not explain the complex nature of the human ability to think complex thoughts.

In keeping with the belief that humans have a material existence, Vygotsky also explains that our thoughts—our subjective nature—are firmly connected to the objective and social worlds around us.⁵ Because there is no direct link between our subjective thoughts and the objective and social worlds, he explains that language, in its broadest symbolic interpretation and as the product of historical, cultural, and social processes, is the third point linking our subjective thoughts to our objective and social worlds.⁶

When we look at the complexity of adult thoughts and actions, it is almost impossible to see where and how such complexity materially originated. In order to begin to understand the nature of higher-order thinking, Vygotsky claims one needs to first consider the origins and development of higher-order thinking in infancy and early childhood. He proposes that higher-order thinking in infants begins in the first few weeks of life as the direct process and product of socialisation between the infant and his or her adult minders. The presence of mature members of society is essential to the development of higher-order thinking capabilities. He notes children learn from specific instances and form generalisations, which are then frequently modified as they gain further exposure to life experiences, information, and knowledge of a topic.⁷ In this way, a child develops personal spirals of specific-general knowledge to extend their original understandings.

For example, a child’s first observations of a cat might be of the family tabby. One day, she might notice the neighbour’s orange cat strutting along the fence and look in wonder when mother explains it too is a cat. Thus the child would refine her generalised understanding of the term cat from tabby to domestic cats of more than one colour. With further exposure to other cats, such as tigers and lions in the local zoo, the child would develop a more comprehensive understanding of society’s use of the term cat, from which she would then be able to identify and use the term cat in keeping with the expectations of her family, community, and society.

Children early become co-participants in their social and cultural environments and are able to actively contribute to the direction and nature of those environments as they age. The use by children of technology and cultural artefacts, such as watching TV, is just one example of how children are involved in creating changes to their cultural and social environments.

Consciousness is another quality defined differently by materialists in contrast to those who hold a dualist understanding of human nature. Scientists attempting to develop artificial intelligence generally take the view that intelligence should be understandable and replicable in a material sense. Yet consciousness has remained one of the most puzzling qualities to explain in purely materialist terms. Although marketing strategists and others have very successfully learned how to manipulate consciousness to great economic, social, and political advantages, scientists are still no closer to understanding what consciousness actually is than what was understood in the earliest records found in ancient Greek philosophy.⁸

Consciousness is surely connected to our material nature, even though we are currently