Table of Contents
Click any essays in italics to view expanded
summary
|
Overview: The Need to Examine Immediacy
Ancestry of
the Book
Transcendence of Immediacy: Introduction
Transcending One’s Immediate World: Revisiting Viktor Frankl
Bridges
to Transcendence: Why We Praise God While Coping with
Extreme Sickness,
Death, and Misfortune
Cults:
Once Again We Are Surprised and Shocked
The Case
of the False Messiah: Adolf Hitler
Personal
Moral Virility In the Immediacy of Daily Life
Constricted Immediacy: Introduction
A
Reassessment of the Milgram Experiments
Blindings Against Immediacy: Some Moral Games
We Play
When We Confront Unpleasant Realities
Moral
Dilemmas in Immediacy: Knowing Too Little, Knowing Too Much
Impingings, Linkages, Shadows and the Shaping of Immediacy:
Introduction
The World of Riders – And the
Dynamics of Immediacy
Impingings of Dormant and Hidden Immediacies
The
Immediacy of Distance: The Case of Cheap Sausage and the
Acceptance
of a Murderous Regime
Exclusivities: Shadows We Create Over Our Moral Immediacy
Nurturing Inward Exclusivities: A Look at Some Religious
Issues
Shaping
Immediacy – The Particular Ways We Look at the World:
The Case of Gestalt Psychology
Transformations of Immediacy: Introduction
The Second Path in the
Course of Personal Careers: Escalating Dualities
Moral Mutation
– The Immediacy of Tomorrow?
Switchings: Drastic Reconfigurations in Immediacy
Fusions That Create a New Immediacy: A Look at Some Aspects
of the
Spanish Inquisition
The Unknowable in Immediacy: Introduction to the Location of
Local Autonomy
Immediacy and Not-Knowing: the Case of Bounded Indeterminacy
Conclusion
|
Excerpts
A MORAL DIMENSION IN
OUR LIVES
See the section, “Transformations of Immediacy" and the essay,
“Moral Mutations”
“First and
foremost, we humans are moral creatures.” But morality gives us
a bipolar gift.
A. Morality
can set forth our personal compass; it tells us who we are, what
our life is all about; it provides us with our fundamental
values.
B.
Morality can also
encourage and even sanctify the most horrifying deeds, by giving
them “moral” justification.
The book faces
up to this bipolarity by investigating the Local Moral
Universe under which we operate much of the time and through
which, for example, ethnic cleansing can be carried out by
citizens who feel fully convinced that they are operating under
a high moral purpose, Morally-convinced individuals can be far
more dangerous than the crazies and deviants of our world.
A SCIENCE DIMENSION
See the section “The Unknowable in Immediacy”
A. The
beginning of the 20th century saw Einstein address
Time in a new way, as a phenomenon in its own right, using
physics as the template on which to develop his ideas. This book
suggests that with the beginning of the 21st century,
we should address Immediacy as a phenomenon in its own right. It
contains attributes that can be understood. Five of these
attributes (Transcendence, Constriction, Impingings,
Transformation, and the Unknowable that is known by its limits)
are addressed in this book, using social psychology as the
template on which to develop the ideas.
B. Included
are some new thoughts about the Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle, which taught us that there are limits to our ability
to measure certain phenomena. Instead: Some forms of
uncertainty may be useful and necessary for systems to operate.
These forms of uncertainty can be identified and located quite
precisely. See the book’s discussion of “Structured
Indeterminacy.”
A SEXUAL DIMENSION
See the section, "Impingings, Linkages, Shadows and the Shaping
of Immediacy" and the essay, “The World of Riders – and the
Dynamics of Immediacy”
Human sexuality
is a shunting station, where non-sexual ingredients
converge and mobilize to influence sexual performance; the
non-sexual ingredients then act as riders to one’s sexual
activity. The shunted sexuality can, in turn, become riders to
our non-sexual activity. Human sexuality is one of several such
rider-and-shunting stations in our lives.
A PRACTICAL DIMENSION
See the
section, "Transformations of Immediacy" and the essay, “The
Second Path in the course of Personal Careers”
What
therapists, counselors – and psychologists, psychiatrists,
sociologists, social workers – can derive from the book.
A. Personal
careers: Looking at the dark side. Behind the public face of our
careers – the posed, competent successful side – there can lurk
the sometimes painful, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes rageful
dimensions we cannot confront or admit, even to ourselves. These
may be shunted into a Second Path that can have a life of
its own, sometimes erupting in unexpected ways, including even
suicides.
Concerning our consciousness: The
subconscious. Going beyond the Freudian views about
preconscious and unconscious processes in our lives that are
mostly formed by early life experiences which can, later on,
mess up our lives. Instead, recognizing that the subconscious
can be fed continually, from our ongoing experiences that are
too painful to face, creating the Second Path that can give rise
to precisely the sort of neurotic behavior Freud attributed to
early life experiences and which, on occasion, may blow up our
lives in disastrous ways. |
