Sunflower Mind: An embodied philosophy of life as interaction
The interaction (the circumstances) shapes you. Sensing into your bodily experience puts you in touch with the bottom-up response of your organism.
What we mean by Relational Implicit is the emergence of meaning in our interactions. We explore it as an embodied experience (somatic implicit), as a shared experience (shared implicit), and as the glue that binds societies together (collective implicit).
This exploration takes place within the context of a shift:
– from a model where people are seen as individual units, to the psychology of interaction;
– from a top-down, cognitive model to a bottom-up model where much is implicit as opposed to explicit.
Implicit means intangible. It does not mean ethereal. We are talking here about embodied experience.
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The interaction (the circumstances) shapes you. Sensing into your bodily experience puts you in touch with the bottom-up response of your organism.
Felt sensing is a natural ability that we all have. For many of us, it takes a special kind of attention to find it as we have been over-reliant on explicit cognition.
The body we are referring to is much more than just the physical body. It is the experience of the body from the inside.
A felt sense is something that happens really fast, below the radar of awareness. It’s in the same general category as a hunch, an intuition, or a gut feeling.
The phrase implicit relational knowing was first used to describe the way babies know how to watch and respond to their mothers.
We implicitly respond to experience as we live it. These responses can be called self-states. They are a bottom-up, whole-organism response, as opposed to a top-down response
What happens in the space where interpersonal connection takes place? To the untrained eye, it’s an empty space.
Myths are the glue that binds societies together, small tribes as well as countries or supranational entities.
The experience of selfhood is not the entirety of our organism, but an integrated expression of the entire organism acting in its environment.
While cognition, intelligence, knowledge, and research are mandatory for a surgeon, it takes manual dexterity for surgery to be successful.