Classical Daoist Meditation, 400–100 bce

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold D. Roth
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Attentional Focus ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemplative Practice ◽  
Meditative Practice ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

Daoism is the indigenous Chinese religious tradition that has been a major feature of this culture for over two thousand years. It is grounded in a comprehensive cosmology of the Way (Dao) that derives from the ancient practice of a meditation that emphasizes attentional focus and mental tranquility attained through an apophatic (self-negating) practice of systematically emptying consciousness of its normal contents. These foundational ideas are present in a series of surviving works that include the famous Laozi and Zhuangzi, which have recently been supplemented by newly excavated texts and newly appreciated extant ones known for millennia. They contain a meditative practice that has been called “inner cultivation” and that emphasizes methods that develop concentration in order to empty the mind of all common thoughts, desires, emotions, and perceptions. These lead ultimately to self-transcending experiences in which adepts experience a complete union with the non-dual Way. The return to dualistic consciousness is accompanied by a fresh and transformed cognition in which adepts are able to spontaneously and effortlessly act in harmony with all new circumstances. This flowing cognition is able to effect transformations in other people and in the body politic and so becomes part of the arcana of government advocated to local kings by the scholar-practitioners of this tradition. These apophatic methods constitute one of the main contemplative practice streams within the Daoist religious tradition and its continuities with later Daoism are detailed by Louis Komjathy in another chapter of this volume.

scholarly journals I feel, therefore I am

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-63
Author(s):  
Adriana Montheiro
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
The Body ◽  
Transactional Analysis ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Kind Permission ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

This paper appeared originally in Portuguese as Sinto, logo Sou - um estudo sobre o significado das emoções e suas funções. Revista Brasileira de Análise Transacional XXI, 2011, n.1, 29-41 and is reproduced here by kind permission of UNAT-BRASIL - União Nacional de Analistas Transacionais – Brasil. Emotion is not a concept that can be accurately defined, even if in ordinary language it refers to affective states. The theory of transactional analysis, created by Berne and developed by his followers, is impregnated with the concept of emotion. In order to bring more light to these questions, the present article discusses the biopsychology of emotions, considering their objectives and functions, considering the influence of neuroscience. We also refer to authors who did a theoretical review of transactional analysis from the perspective of biology and the mind, such as Allen and Hine. We have also included authors with a body approach such as Reich and Levine for their significant contributions both to understanding how the scripting system is embedded in the body, and to consider the possibility of developing a systematic body approach within Adult decontamination methodology. We conclude that there are no destructive emotions. Destructive is the way one learns to deal with feelings, with sensations and emotions. And working on emotions is working on lifescript.

Surplus Repressive Punishment and Spirit’s Regressive (de-)Actualisation

2018 ◽  
pp. 212-240
Author(s):  
Wes Furlotte
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
The Real ◽  
Social Objective ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins with a provoking claim: the real problem here is not the natural dimension involved in criminality. Instead, it argues that the real threat to freedom’s social actualization is the way in which the state’s disciplinary apparatus reacts to violations of right. It shows that if criminality needs to be framed in terms of nature then so does punishment. If punishment functions to (re-)habituate transgressive persons, then one of its inherent risks is that it might operate as a brute externality, a natural force. In functioning as an external natural force, punishment actively mutilates the freedom constitutive of juridical personhood. Not only does this mutilation undermine the individual it also actively undermines spirit’s social (objective) expression as freedom because such a practice serves to (a) fragment and alienate the person and (b) the totality constituting the body politic. This threat is what the chapter calls “surplus repressive punishment.” This problem as a whole is what the chapter denotes with “spirit’s regressive (de-)actualization.” Consequently, the problem nature poses in Hegel’s system is even more complex when considered in terms of how the polis’ institutions frame, understand, and react to that very same problem.

The Rise of Nervous Illness

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Shorter
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
The Body ◽  
Time Out ◽  
Humoral Medicine ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Prospect Of Success ◽  
The Way

It is much better, people think, for the nerves than the mind to be ill. The nerves are physical structures, and heal in the way that all organs of the body heal naturally. Disorders of the mind are frightening because they are so intangible, and, we think, may well lead to insanity rather than recovery. From time out of mind, people have privileged nervous illness over mental illness. From time out of mind, societies have had expressions for the varieties of frets, anxieties, and dyspepsias to which the flesh is heir. In France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one term was “vapours,” a reference from humoral medicine to supposed exhalations of the viscera that would rise in the body to affect the brain. A major apostle was London physician John Purcell, writing in 1702, of “those who have laboured long under this distemper, [who] are oppressed with a dreadful anguish of mind and a deep melancholy, always reflecting on what can perplex, terrify, and disorder them most, so that at last they think their recovery impossible, and are very angry with those who pretend there is any hopes of it.” He emphasized melancholia and anguish, and for him the “vapours” were something more than a mild attack of the frets. But this was not for everyone. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, now 60 and living in exile in Italy, described to her estranged husband in 1749 Italian health care arrangements, and how physicians visited rich and poor alike. “This last article would be very hard if we had as many vapourish ladies as in England, but those imaginary ills are entirely unknown here. When I recollect the vast fortunes raised by doctors amongst us [in England], and the eager pursuit after every new piece of quackery that is introduced, I cannot help thinking there is a fund of credulity in mankind . . . and the money formerly given to monks for the health of the soul is now thrown to doctors for the health of the body, and generally with as little real prospect of success.”

Healthcare of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and its Politicization, 1970–1991: Treating the Body Politic

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-169
Author(s):  
Clarissa Charlotte Hjalmarsson
Keyword(s):  
Health Service ◽  
Healthcare System ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Population Groups ◽  
National Community ◽  
Existing Structures ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
The Way

Abstract:This article explores the health service provided by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) during the Eritrean Liberation War, and its political dimensions and implications. The EPLF used healthcare to define itself politically against its rivals and to penetrate communities. It aimed to incorporate population groups into the struggle, to inculcate EPLF ideology, and to transform the national community. EPLF practitioners were most successful when they cooperated with existing structures of power. The progressive, dynamic, and transformative nature of the healthcare system is inextricable from the coercion sometimes used to achieve the ideals of the EPLF, and the way in which healthcare became an instrument of biopolitical control.

scholarly journals NEW MYTHS, NEW SCRIPTS: REVISIONIST MYTHOPOESIS IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN’S POETRY

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Deirdre Byrne
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
The Body ◽  
African Women ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
American Women ◽  
South African Women ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

Considerable theoretical and critical work has been done on the way British and American women poets re-vision (Rich 1976) male-centred myth. Some South African women poets have also used similar strategies. My article identifies a gap in the academy’s reading of a significant, but somewhat neglected, body of poetry and begins to address this lack of scholarship. I argue that South African women poets use their art to re-vision some of the central constructs of patriarchal mythology, including the association of women with the body and the irrational, and men with the mind and logic. These poems function on two levels: They demonstrate that the constructs they subvert are artificial; and they create new and empowering narratives for women in order to contribute to the reimagining of gender relations.

scholarly journals Habit, the Criminal Body and the Body Politic in England, c. 1700–1800

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 83-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Martin Dodsworth
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Social Circumstance

This article explores the role that ‘habit’ played in discourses on crime in the 18th century, a subject which forms an important part of the history of ‘the social’. It seeks to bridge the division between ‘liberal’ positions which see crime as a product of social circumstance, and the conservative position which stresses the role of will and individual responsibility, by drawing attention to the role habit played in uniting these conceptions in the 18th century. It argues that the Lockean idea that the mind was a tabula rasa, and that the character was thereby formed through impression and habit, was used as a device to explain the ways in which certain individuals rather than others happened to fall into a life of crime, a temptation to which all were susceptible. This allowed commentators to define individuals as responsible for their actions, while accepting the significance of environmental factors in their transgressions. Further, the notion that the character was formed through habit enabled reformers to promote the idea that crime could be combated through mechanisms of prevention and reformation, which both targeted the individual criminal and sought more generally to reduce the likelihood of crime.

Politicizing the Body: Property, Contract, and Rights

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moira Gatens
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rich Source ◽  
The West ◽  
The Way

This article examines the politicization of the human body focusing on the way this issue was conceived in the West. The human body has long been used as a source of metaphor for political theorists and the very notion of body politic leans on the image of a unified and discrete entity that has commanding parts and obeying parts that may be robust or ailing, strong or weak. This article suggests that aside from political theory with a rich source of metaphor, the human body also serves as the nexus where political conceptions of the universal and the particular meet.

Is posthuman incest possible? Science fiction and the futures of the body

2018 ◽  
pp. 198-222
Author(s):  
Alistair Brown
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Body ◽  
Incest Taboo ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

In evaluating the interplay of biological and social interpretations of the incest taboo, most literary commentaries have used fiction to show how notions of incest have changed historically through the variable of culture; in these accounts, the biological body remains a constant, whilst society adapts its parameters for what counts as incest. However, science fiction introduces material embodiment itself as a variable, as it hypothesises bodies that can be altered (e.g. through genetics) or even eliminated (e.g. through virtualising the mind via a computer). Through comparing three science fiction novels, this chapter evaluates whether such changing types of embodiment will also change the way in which society approaches the incest taboo, or even remove it entirely.

Sudanese Women’s Groups on Facebook and #Civil_Disobedience:Nairat or Thairat?(Radiant or Revolutionary?)

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nada Mustafa Ali
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Way

Abstract:The first two decades of the twenty-first century witnessed expanded digital connectivity, with important political implications, evident in the way activists used Facebook and Twitter to mobilize for political change in North Africa and beyond in 2010/2011, and in Sudan, including in 2018 and 2019. These platforms are also often sites where women may articulate narratives on the body and the body politic. Through digital ethnographic research, this study explores social and cultural narratives on everyday body aesthetics that Sudanese women articulate in selected groups on Facebook. I argue that the role some of these groups played in organizing civil disobedience in Sudan in November 2016 disrupts the binary inherent in the question:Nairat or Thairat?

scholarly journals The ‘body politic’ in ancient China

2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chun-chieh Huang
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Core ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Inside Out ◽  
Chinese Philosophers ◽  
State Functions

The ‘body politic’ occupies the core position in traditional Chinese political thinking. This is strongly supported by the fact that, for most ancient Chinese philosophers, self-cultivation was taken as the starting point of a programmatic way leading to the management of the world. The aim of this essay is to analyze the meaning and significance of the prevailing ‘body politic’ of ancient China.In section two, the Chinese ‘body politic’ is placed within a comparative frame with the ideas of Plato (428–347 BCE) and Hobbes (1588–1679). It is argued that the ‘body politic’ in China is far from an abstract or theoretical discourse; the state was epistemologically taken as an extension of the human body, which is integral and organic in itself. Thus the body served as a metaphor or symbol to explain the organization and functionality of the state.Section three details the ‘body politic’ in three ways. First, due to the comparability between the state and the body, the ruling of the state, as that of the body, should also commence with a kind of inside-out, morality-concerned self-cultivation. Second, there is a complicated interdependency between state functions, which are similar to those of the body. Third, if there is a center of dominancy gathered through the interactive process of the body, then a kind of political autocracy can thus be extrapolated in by the ‘body politic’.The conclusion points out that, in ancient Chinese body-thinking, the mind-heart had its socio-political dimensions, and the ‘body’ is no less than a psychosomatic one. Since the unification of China in 221 BCE, Confucianism had gradually gained the political vantage and become the imperial ideology. However, the ancient ideal of the ‘Confucianization of politics’ was thus transformed to the reality of the ‘politicization of Confucianism’.

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