In the World with Others

The following is a quote that a friend gave me:


"Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music--the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."

~Henry Miller

One of the things I admire the most about the philosophy of Heidegger, is the notion of this Being or Dasein, the idea that we are always and from the start already with the people, places, times and objects of our shared world. This is Mitsein, Being-with.

There is no Cartesian impasse; we are not ghosts in the machines of a body, we are not prisoners to our subjective (and rational) consciousness. Res Cogitans and Res Extensa, Descartes Ontological categories are mistaken.
(see http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/r9.htm)

There is no need to create an intellectual, rational bridge from us to the world, to others. We don't need to kick and worry how to escape from a cocoon.

Although I admire them, psychologists and authors such as Rollo May, Carl Rogers, and Binswanger are simply on the way towards Being. Binswanger felt he needed to supplement Heidegger's notion of Care with one of love. Medard Boss understood Heidegger perfectly.

Attunement

One of the more important ideas I discovered from the existential philosopher Heidegger, an idea more fully flushed out in its significance by the Psychologist Medard Boss, who used Heidegger's philosophy, is that of Attunement.

For example:
A man who is starving can only see in the world all those things which correspond to his hunger, to the extent that the things in his environment reveal themselves to him, they are likely to reveal only their edible qualities, for instance. For his existence is attuned to hunger, and this is the way his Da-sein (Being) is open to the world.

Medard Boss puts these ideas to excellent use to explain the meaning of dreams, in contrast to Freudian theory which involves completely hypothetical and unrealistic assumptions - such as creating a dream censor that decides what content to "filter out." (so is there a little man in our heads, then, deciding for us? The paradox of an "unaware awareness.")

I will leave you with a few of my own reflections along this line of thought, which has been fruitful to me: It is impossible to remain in a state (attunement) of anxiety when you make efforts to be in a state of love, or Care (another fundamental concept itself for Heidegger).

If I have found anything to be the polar opposite of anxiety, it is Care and Love.

It is along the lines of this notion of "Attunement," that I relate Wayne Dyer's Power of Intention to Heidegger's existential philosophy. From Dyer;
"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

Dyer immediately makes the leap to suggest that our attunement (he does not use the term himself) has an effect of drawing certain things closer or farther from us, and therefore advises things such as remaining in a state of constant gratitude. I see the reasoning behind his thinking, and in a sense it is well-known and common; ie "What you fear finds you." However, I have not quite yet arrived at the conclusion myself from the standpoint of Understanding, e.g. the process by which our existence can repel or attract things that are usually viewed as being quite separate from our "thoughts," such as money, being in a certain place etc.

If we can bring what we desire into our lives simply by the way we exist, more specifically by paying attention to the way we exist, the way we choose to live in and see the world, the potential is unlimited for attracting all the good things we want into our lives.