MAPS OF THE MIND
Print format

From: Bruce S.
Date: Friday, September 14, 2007, 5:23 PM
Subject: Maps of the Mind
ID: 258483

As this project continues to unfold, I continue to add new dimensions to its layout and breadth. Today, I got this new internet domain "bridgeacrossconsciousness.net" working, and put up a series of links to this book I admire, Maps of the Mind - Charts and Concepts of the Mind and its Labyrinths, by Charles Hampden-Turner.

I think it makes sense to put these ideas into this process immediately, because Hampden-Turner so eloquently introduces many basic concepts and schools of psychology. And his work is motivated in a spirit I admire.

'What is the mind?' is a question that has intrigued people from the earliest times -- indeed for as long as man has considered the possibility of mind at all.

This book brings together in visual form numerous ways in which the mind has been conceived. Since visuo-spatial imagery of the human is a style largely missing from the dominant schools of psychology and philosophy, there can be no pretense of impartially cataloguing the status quo. The image-breakers are still in charge.

This entire book is a plea for the revision of social science, religion and philosophy, to stress connectedness, coherence, relationship, organicism and wholeness, as against the fragmenting, reductive and compartmentalizing forces of the prevailing orthodoxies. My belief is that the industrial cultures are dangerously overdifferentiated and underintegrated. We compulsively exaggerate our differences while ignoring what we have in common.

The maps here are deliberately selected and described with a view to their overall compatibility, complementarity and convergence. W.H. Auden wrote that we must 'love each other or die'. 'Love' is a trifle too ambitious perhaps, but we can understand.

In his Map 6, The Broken Image, Hampden-Turner repeats and details this same theme, calling for the emergence of an integral model -- a "coherent map".

In the two and a half centuries between the deaths of Descartes and Darwin the image of mind was so shattered and reduced by scientists and philosophers that no coherent map emerged. This assault on the mind has continued into the twentieth century and today psychology is still mostly in pieces, broken bits of affect, intelligence, attention, response, memory, behaviour, attitude, belief, and anxiety, scattered through innumerable sectarian journals. No one can put Humpty Dumpty together again, and so long as the 'machine analogy' survives, no one ever will, for the principle of cohesion has been destroyed by the very process of analysing.

These are powerful and visionary statements, by a writer and scholar who has intimately surveyed the breadth of this field, and brings to it a creative passion for its potential.

These themes will emerge in endless ways through this exploration of "The Bridge" -- this emerging new model that maps the flow of logic across levels -- recognizing the power and meaning and importance of the "reductionist" methods -- but in so doing, preserving those "higher levels" that are known only through the mind and its concepts, and which are, nonetheless, no less real...

Ken Wilber's discussion of "Holons" is also pertinent to this vision -- and we'll be bringing in his ideas as well. But for now, for today -- this work by Hampden-Turner is an inspired example of "integral psychology", by someone who has brought together something like 60 "maps" -- all of which can help illuminate this emerging new integral model, this "Bridge Across Consciousness" -- which defines these levels, and this bridgework, in ways that are at the same time, entirely faithful to the ancient and contemporary metaphysical traditions, while fully embracing the absolute determinism of today's computer science.