Closed Concepts Inside

The model of closed and open concepts is not only applicable to organizations and groups. We can also find it when we turn towards our inner world. Our inclination to certain systems in the social, cultural, political and religious world can be connected to systems we carry inside of us. Closed systems exist wherever its core, which is its central value, is unconscious.

For instance, we react angrily when someone talks derogatively about our home country. The anger is fuelled by a value, which we deem important and which we want to defend with this emotion. Internally, we are identified with a value, which often resides in the unconsciousness. Still, if it were conscious and we had collected a lot of reasons for defending this value when attacked, it is an identification with a center which we do not want to give up at any cost.

Each of these closed concepts, even if are they are small and inconsiderable, has a center. This is the part of the concept which has to be true without questioning, so without lightening up its background, roots and development.

When we reject a person and collect all the bad things about her and turn off all the good things, we build up a closed system. Presumably, its center bears an unconscious unpleasant experience, still undigested, of which the person reminds us. We are unaware of this connection, which is drawn by our unconscious mind. For as soon as we realize that there is an experience connected with emotions behind this rejection, the system opens up and the person appears in a different light. Suddenly we can admit that this person also has good sides.

Absolutized Values

In case we want to find a way out of the closed concepts of our inner world, it is important to spot the relevant center. Only then we can start to explore why it is so important to us and why we have absolutized it, why we have put it out of question. What would happen if we would not take it so seriously? What would happen if we would turn an absolute truth into a relative one? Would we lose or win on freedom?

Does this mean that we should get rid of all our values as soon as we have discovered them? For sure we need values to secure our orientation in a world of divergent interests and values. It is important to take a stand here and there where values are presented, which ignore the dignity of man and the integrity of nature. For this stand, we do not need absolute values, but values for a flexible use. These can keep us in line with a basic orientation, which is inherent in our lives.

This basic ethical orientation is not part of any ideology but is sustained by the innate wisdom of nature and mankind as part of it. It can only vaguely be translated into single values or concepts like freedom, justice and so on. The closer we look at a certain problem, the clearer we get the kind of value best to apply to that situation.

The inner way, which is a way towards growing up and ripening, a way to one’s own power and clarity, is a way towards enlargement and opening and includes the continuous release of our unconscious habits of evaluation and judgement and of closed mental systems. We can only succeed in this undertaking by bringing them to consciousness. We have a hell lot of closed systems and concepts in grand variety inside our complex inner world. We can detect them as they show up anytime something bothers or irritates us. Someone shares an opinion we do not like, and we start to think in a negative way about this person – this is a closed system dominating us in this moment.

Closed Concepts and Orientations

“The inner way includes the continuous release of our unconscious habits of evaluation and judgement and of closed mental systems.” Is this sentence from the context above in itself a center of a closed system, thus with absolute truth? We can turn it into that by permanently and consequently following it and by teaching other people to do that as well and by pointing out to them what the consequences would be in case they do not follow our insight. So we can use this sentence as the foundation of a teaching and gather people around us as followers. We can say that this sentence is true at any time.

But we also can say: We use this sentence as an orientation, as an indication for self-inquiry and self-reflection and consider the effects of this form of inner work. We can say: With the help of this sentence or the meaning expressed by it, we check our inner concepts, opinions and beliefs. We search for their centers and ponder whether we need them any longer or not.

So we use the sentence as a tool or a methodological guideline and not as an absolute truth. We inspire other people to use it the same way when we notice that it is helpful for us. But we leave them their total freedom to take the advice or leave it or to make something else out of our suggestion. Thus, we have won an open concept which can help us to transform closed concepts inside ourselves and become a more and more open human being.

Further reading:
Closed Concepts and Their Centers
Open and Closed Concepts

Mindfulness in Shopping Malls

How will we go about our shopping activities in the future? What will our much-cherished shopping experience be like in the year 2028? According to various prognoses, retail trade is entering into a crisis. People will walk into a particular shop, take a look at the product, be given advice and then buy it elsewhere over the internet. Or they will go to the shop merely to pick up something they ordered online.     

However, it is the major companies that can profit from today‘s technological advancements. Westfield, the Australian-American-British chain of department stores, has announced plans to this effect. These involve: aisles overflowing with artificial intelligence, a farm where any customer can go and harvest vegetables, and smart lavatories giving health tips such as, „You could do with a little more vitamin C, Sir. And how about purchasing a drink from our store before you dehydrate?“ Yes, that sort of language might soon be heard emanating from a toilet.       

The shopping malls of the future will be „hyperconnected micro cities“. Hanging sensory gardens, eye scanners telling the customers what they previously bought, and smart changing booths in which customers may assess their virtually simulated frame in the considered article of clothing.

These offers do not surprise me in the least and will probably fail to increase my low propensity for shopping. What does amaze me, however, is that in the shopping mall of the future there are to be mindfulness courses for people to take.     

I quite like the idea, yet the project could easily blow up in corporate faces: if people were to become more mindful and deepen their awareness, inner richness would end up more important to them than the shopping activities they carry out on the outside and material goods they buy. The impulse to go shopping, as caused by mechanisms of addiction spurred by the advertising industry, would be considerably weakened. Consumers would become more modest and contented, their needs would become more simple and they would turn from short-lived fashion trends to something longer-lasting. It would indeed be an important contribution to curtailing the dynamised waste of resources.

Ergo: Let us go for more mindfulness in shopping malls!

Insecurities in Secure Attachment

Since more than thirty years, the attachment theory based on the research of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth belongs to the central concepts of relationship psychology and forms a crucial background theory for psychotherapy. This theory labels three types of insecure attachment and one secure style, which according to several studies around half of the mother-child-relationships can be attributed to. In this article, I want to differentiate the secure attachment style.

Secure attachment is characterized by the ability to keep the needs for closeness and distance in a fluid balance. Neither being alone nor being close triggers fears or tensions. Separation is not experienced as existentially threatening abandonment, and being together does not contain a drive to unresolvable melting.

Elements of Insecurity

Yet there are also secure attachments, which contain elements of insecurity. Probably that is true to all secure attachments, for there are rarely parents who can grant secure attachment to their children on all levels.

There is an interesting variation in the following example: Parents can use the security in attachment as a mental and emotional construction for suppressing their own insecurity in attachment. Security of relationships in the whole family system is held up with ostentation. This is often the case in relationships, which started under insecure circumstances on the outside so the founding of a family was meant to form a nest of security, e.g. during or after war or economic crisis.  People withdraw from an unbearable reality and build up sheltered refuges for regenerating life.

Still there is a price to pay: For the sake of security, individual freedom has to be given up. Freedom is considered as threat for this stability. In this system, people want from the others to be accountable, and this is why they try to behave accountable themselves. To keep up this in itself shaky network of reliable expectations, a lot of subtle pressure and covered manipulation is required.

Members of these systems are not acknowledged and safeguarded against loss of love because of their individuality, but only insofar as they adapt to given expectations. Parents demand from their offspring to give them a safety they did not have themselves – and all this happens on an unconscious level – and the children give in to this role, because they do not have an alternative, and refrain from self-centred aspirations.

Tribal Roots

This structure of sacrificing individuality in favour of the system as a whole is well known from the tribal organization of society. Tribal communities in early human history only could allow a small amount of individuality, as the social frame was closely woven and traded knowledge had to be sacred and unchangeable. In the course of history, new developments emerged, which broke the narrow confinements of tribalism and offered more space for individualities to unfold. Yet the remembrance of the cosiness and security of this early phase was never forgotten, and so it can easily be instrumentalised by different ideologies.

Ideologically Faked Securities

Interesting for the history of Middle Europe is the connection with the presumed security, national socialism and other fascistic movement have promised 90 years ago, a security guaranteed by an accountable racially unified community („Ein Volk“). As a precondition served ethnical purity, “one” blood without strange ingredients, so that any deviations from an unconsciously created consensus of “the people” would be impossible. This context explains the brutality, with which all that should be eradicated that was racially alien. In reality, what was threatened was not the “purity of race” but the safety of a net of prejudices and preoccupations, which was meant to grant inner security. Successfully, anything strange was equated with unpredictability, which was considered the same as dangerous. The efficacy of this ideology is evidently unbroken up to today and still attracts many people.

Subtle Dependencies

It is impossible to erect a functioning tribal community (except in the heads of right-wing national populists), just as there is absolute safety in family attachments. Under the guise of love and communion, often subtle dependencies are created, fuelled by the unconsciousness of parents due to their unfulfilled needs for attachment in childhood. The soul wants to get back from the won children what has been missed long before. The secure attachment, parents offer, serves the purpose of receiving love, which was absent in the beginning. Children cover this deficit and start to suffer themselves from the flaw of love, which can only be perceived on an unconscious level.

Yet the conflicts of emancipation in adolescence can be very grave in such cases. For the parents, the securities are at stake, which they have created via their children, and for the children, their own life is at risk. They want to retrieve their birth right of recognition of their true self.

Every soul wants to set free. Adolescents, who break out of the guidelines of their families, pay a service to themselves and to their parents to check the concepts of love and to define them anew. As long as love is mixed with dependency, there are inner forces, which surface in conflicts. When these tensions can be resolved in a constructive way, dependent attachments can be transformed into free flowing relationships. Thus, a deeper wisdom is revealed, that safety can only be found in inner freedom.

Further recommendations:
A Start With a Welcome
Developmental Trauma 

A Start With a Welcome

When we invite and welcome friends, we see it as our duty as hosts to accept the people who come as they are and enjoy them as such. When children come to this world, we are enchanted and mesmerized (in case we are connected to ourselves). We do not even consider that this tiny being could be different as to how her/she is, in his/her perfect charm.

Whenever we set off with something new, it needs this warm welcome. We need the feeling that we get a place where we can feel safe and which can serve as a base for expanding into the new realm. We need encouragement and assertion that the new project is good and appropriate for us and that we are on the right path.

Even more so, this need is active at our earliest start, at the moment of conception. New life

is created, and as scientists have found out, the fertilized egg cell celebrates by releasing billions of zinc atoms to create radiant light. This is as if nature performs a firework to transmit the message of this terrific beginning to the whole world.

Yet not all future parents are excited about the new life that is coming into their lives, out of different reasons. So in these cases, a proper welcome is disturbed. As we know from prenatal therapy, the tiny beings feel how their closest environment reacts to their appearance – full of joy and excitement, or full of worries or even fright. Rejecting pregnancy, as much as it might be understandable from the actual circumstances of the parent’s lives, casts a lasting shadow over the young being, which he/she will carry on as a burden throughout life.

Especially in this fragile beginning, new life is reliant on safe and trustworthy surroundings for its survival. Yet this survival is in question, when there are doubts or fears in the parents concerning the existence of the child, equal in the mother, the father or both. Even rejection from the parents of the parents or other close persons can trigger fears of survival in the child. For it is totally dependent on goodwill and being wanted by its close environment. It does not have any power over its own fate, no capabilities of communicating its anguish and no means to cope with the fears of annihilation.

According to research in prenatal psychology, there are especially two moments in which such a traumatization can happen: Right at conception, when the fear of pregnancy is inherent in the sexuality of the parents, and a few weeks later, when the mother notices her pregnancy. Of course, subsequent attempts for abortion additionally inflict the growing life in a disastrous way.

A secure attachment to both mother and father is crucial for the wellbeing of the child. When the parents question the pregnancy, the parental attachment is severely compromised and the existence of the child is overshadowed from its very beginning creating feelings of unsettlement. This blueprint of unsecure attachment can exacerbate and complicate all future relationships. It can form a basic attitude towards life (not to belong to this world, having no place), connected with a strong longing for some magical place in fantasy, where happiness could eventually be found. Fears, doubts and longings are projected onto parents, partners in relationships and friends, who are declared as responsible for covering the enormous needs for security and safety, and usually they will be overstrained by these demands and will react accordingly. When little needs in daily life do not get fulfilled immediately, emotional dramas full of despair can be triggered.

Putative Welcome

Some parents tell their offspring how much they were wanted and welcomed. This can be good for the children and enhance their feelings of safety in life. Yet what does it mean when the children cannot accept or believe the message in the depth of their soul and still feel unsafe in their world? Every well-meaning parent also possesses subconscious motivations and impulses, usually without noticing. Children have a sense for these levels and the ambiguities resulting from them.  Yet they cannot understand what is going on. It often happens that the fears of the parents are suppressed by their feelings of obligation. It also can happen that children are glutted by unconscious expectations of the parents. There are strong urges in the subconsciousness of the parents to use the new life for its purposes. Unresolved inner conflicts, unlived endeavors, unattained goals and ideals easily get delegated onto the child. This tiny being is a rather blank page offering itself for the projections coming from the subconsciousness of the parents.

It can also occur that parents who tell their children how much they were looking forward to their arrival, unconsciously want to compensate for their own unsecure prenatal attachment. By doing so, they want to reaffirm their own safety, of which they lacked in their early phases of life. Maybe they want to tell their children that they are trying to accept them in the way they would have needed to be accepted by their own parents. Maybe they want to be especially good parents as they could not experience these qualities in their childhood. There are lots of variations about how to incorporate children into one’s own unconscious life agenda and to thus exploit them for one’s own purposes.

Unconditional Giving

From the start of their lives, children need unconditional love and acceptance from their parents for thriving well from a sound fundament: We welcome you as you are, and we wish that you can grow and develop in a way appropriate to your disposition and being, and we promise to support you as good as we can. This is the message, which grants trust and security, as a basis for further physical and emotional growth.

Free of ambitions, expectations, projections – this is how the welcome for new life should be ideally, and this is a high claim. For it means that parents have to relinquish their own egos as radically as possible. They should be aware of their claims. They should be attentive to all their unconscious tendencies to burden their child with their own plans, and they should give up these impulses. Thus a great beginning of life can be launched.

This attitude includes the further program for raising children – or for cooperating in the grow process of their offspring. This program consists in unconditional service, in giving without counterinsurance, in presence with and for the little ones. Children reciprocate anything they receive, but often not in the form expected by the parents. In the view of the whole, everything comes into balance, but only when the attitude of the parents they have to develop for themselves, is appropriate. The genuine remuneration for being a parent lies in the incomparable joy offered by the new unique being by its very existence, which is nothing but an immense ongoing present.

This is what Khalil Gibran shares with his famous poem:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Further recommendations:
Insecurities in Secure Attachment
Breathwork and Developmental Trauma