Heroes Not Zombies

Do you remember hearing this riddle when you were a child…..”how many sides does a bottle have?”

The answer was “two – and inside and an outside”.

Ken Wilber’s 4 quadrant map stimulates us to think about these two sides of everything – what lies on the outside, the surface, can be seen, pointed to and known – Wilber refers to this aspect as the “right hand side” (related to his diagram), or to whatever can be empirically known by just observing. And what lies inside, on the “left hand side” of his diagram, and which can only be revealed through dialogue and interpretation.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from his “A Brief History of Everything” to explain this thinking tool –

…all of the Right Hand dimensions can be accessed with this empirical gaze, this “monological” gaze, this objectifying stance, this empirical mapping – because you are only studying the exteriors, the surfaces, the aspects of holons that can be seen empirically – the Right Hand aspects, such as the brain.
But the Left Hand aspects, the interior dimensions, can only be accessed by communication and interpretation, by “dialogue” and “dialogical” approaches, which are not staring at the exteriors but sharing of interiors. Not objective but intersubjective. Not surfaces but depths.

and

[the Right Hand phenomena] all have simple location, because they are the physical-material correlates of all holons…….But….none of the Left Hand aspects have simple location. You can point to the brain, or to a rock, or to a town, but you cannot simply point to envy, or pride, or consciousness, or value, or intention, or desire. Where is desire? Point to it. You can’t really, not the way you can point to a rock, because it’s largely an interior dimension, so it doesn’t have simple location. This doesn’t mean it isn’t real! It only means it doesn’t have simple location, and therefore you can’t see it with a microscope or a telescope or any sensory-empirical device.

I find this very helpful. Health care is so dominated by this focus on exteriors, on what can be objectively described and measured, but health is such a human experience, that to ever understand it in any individual demands that you explore their interior dimension. Through dialogue. This is just as real, and, arguably, even more important, than what can be seen on the surface, or the exterior. I like this reference to simple location, because my everyday work is in dialogue, in exploring narrative, in diving into the interior…..which cannot be discovered by simple mapping or locating.