I am going to be a father soon!
I had this question: Does being a good, responsive, and supportive father require that I incorporate the rigid identity of being a father, of saying to myself, "I am a father", making that part of my felt essence? This question is important to me for at least a couple of reasons. First, the nature of my spiritual practice is to deconstruct the normally implicit sense of self, which upon further inspection (in my experience) breaks down into micro sensations in the body and narratives in the mind that are quite ephemeral. Holding on to the rigid perception of myself as the "father" would seem to be in conflict with this. Second, (and maybe this is just a way to rationalize the first), I suspect that clinging too closely to any identity is actually counterproductive to thriving in the world..
In my own experience, I am most at peace and most effective (i.e., a combination of being empathetic, responsive, and creative) when I maintain a kind of non-dual and instinctual awareness. That is, when I am simply in the moment, not overthinking things, and reality appears as just the next thing that is arising and being responded to within a larger field of awareness. This instead of the notion that "I" as a particular identity am controlling things.
I am moved by the following quote from Khalil Gibran on the nature of parenting:
"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."
Of course it is necessary at times for parent and child to play their respective roles (e.g. for the child to listen to the father as the father), but at the same time, it is important that the child be given the space to define themselves in a mutually evolving relationship. It seems to me that rigid identities would limit the ability to have a truly intimate and dynamic relationship.
I have recently been reading the book The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development, by Robert Kegan, which I love and highly recommend. He describes 5 stages of human development, where in each case we emerge from an embeddenness in a previous subjectivity. This is how he describes this emergence:
"Something cannot be internalized until we emerge from our embeddedness in it, for it is our embeddedness, our subjectivity, that leads us to project it onto the world in our constitution of reality...We have begun to see not only how the subject-object balance can be spoken of as the deep structure in meaning-evolution, but also that there is something regular about the process of evolution itself. Growth always involves a process of differentiation, of emergence from embeddedness (Schachtel, 1959), thus creating out of the former subject a new object to be taken by the new subjectivity."
In stage three he describes the interpersonal self, where the person IS their relationships, but they lack any ideological self-determination and autonomy. In stage four he describes the institutional self. The self that, instead of being its relationships, HAS relationships that are mediated through an ideological autonomy. Not surprisingly in this stage true intimacy is not possible.
In stage five, the person recognizes the limitations of both stage three and four. It is described in the following two passages:
"When the self is located not in the institutional but in the coordinating of the institutional, one's own and others, the interior life gets "freed up" (or "broken open") within oneself, and with others; this new dynamism, flow, or play results from the capacity of the new self to move back and forth between psychic systems within itself. Emotional conflict seems to become both recognizable and tolerable to the "Self""
"Such an organization might solve the vacillation between "judgement" or "instinct" by bringing into being a more integrative "judgement", the ultimate purpose of which is not the maintenance of the institutional self for whom feelings are often administrative "problems," but the more dynamic exercises of interindividuality, in which the self is not its duties, roles, or institutions, but the "haver" of them, which having is regulated by the recognition of one's commonality or interdependence with others, others who might even be turned to "instinctually" with no violation of one's "judgement".
I had this question: Does being a good, responsive, and supportive father require that I incorporate the rigid identity of being a father, of saying to myself, "I am a father", making that part of my felt essence? This question is important to me for at least a couple of reasons. First, the nature of my spiritual practice is to deconstruct the normally implicit sense of self, which upon further inspection (in my experience) breaks down into micro sensations in the body and narratives in the mind that are quite ephemeral. Holding on to the rigid perception of myself as the "father" would seem to be in conflict with this. Second, (and maybe this is just a way to rationalize the first), I suspect that clinging too closely to any identity is actually counterproductive to thriving in the world..
In my own experience, I am most at peace and most effective (i.e., a combination of being empathetic, responsive, and creative) when I maintain a kind of non-dual and instinctual awareness. That is, when I am simply in the moment, not overthinking things, and reality appears as just the next thing that is arising and being responded to within a larger field of awareness. This instead of the notion that "I" as a particular identity am controlling things.
I am moved by the following quote from Khalil Gibran on the nature of parenting:
"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."
Of course it is necessary at times for parent and child to play their respective roles (e.g. for the child to listen to the father as the father), but at the same time, it is important that the child be given the space to define themselves in a mutually evolving relationship. It seems to me that rigid identities would limit the ability to have a truly intimate and dynamic relationship.
I have recently been reading the book The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development, by Robert Kegan, which I love and highly recommend. He describes 5 stages of human development, where in each case we emerge from an embeddenness in a previous subjectivity. This is how he describes this emergence:
"Something cannot be internalized until we emerge from our embeddedness in it, for it is our embeddedness, our subjectivity, that leads us to project it onto the world in our constitution of reality...We have begun to see not only how the subject-object balance can be spoken of as the deep structure in meaning-evolution, but also that there is something regular about the process of evolution itself. Growth always involves a process of differentiation, of emergence from embeddedness (Schachtel, 1959), thus creating out of the former subject a new object to be taken by the new subjectivity."
In stage three he describes the interpersonal self, where the person IS their relationships, but they lack any ideological self-determination and autonomy. In stage four he describes the institutional self. The self that, instead of being its relationships, HAS relationships that are mediated through an ideological autonomy. Not surprisingly in this stage true intimacy is not possible.
In stage five, the person recognizes the limitations of both stage three and four. It is described in the following two passages:
"When the self is located not in the institutional but in the coordinating of the institutional, one's own and others, the interior life gets "freed up" (or "broken open") within oneself, and with others; this new dynamism, flow, or play results from the capacity of the new self to move back and forth between psychic systems within itself. Emotional conflict seems to become both recognizable and tolerable to the "Self""
"Such an organization might solve the vacillation between "judgement" or "instinct" by bringing into being a more integrative "judgement", the ultimate purpose of which is not the maintenance of the institutional self for whom feelings are often administrative "problems," but the more dynamic exercises of interindividuality, in which the self is not its duties, roles, or institutions, but the "haver" of them, which having is regulated by the recognition of one's commonality or interdependence with others, others who might even be turned to "instinctually" with no violation of one's "judgement".
2 comments:
I like that quote from Khalil Gibran. I remember reading it somewhere and taking note of it. The first thing that comes to my mind when thinking about the role of a father, is "Provider" and "Protector". Children can teach us as much as we teach them. One rule of thumb of being a parent is "Love". Good thoughts and prayers for you and my daughter in law Aniseh. Blessings. With love, Dad.
Thanks dad, this is great advice! You have definitely given those things to me: Provider, protector, and love. I love you
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