We are a California Non-Profit Corporation and wish to advance the understanding of personal emotional experience based on the work of John J. Lonsbury and western philosophers before him.
This writing determines the place of human emotional intelligence as our essential next stage of evolution if we are to survive in peace. What emerges is the beautiful and courageous path already established in feelings of deep longing, common to us humans.
In his book, Our Flight From Selfhood, Lonsbury examines how this flight has led inevitably to our current cultural crises. He clarifies the intimate relation between our view of ourselves, the cultures we create, and our hopeful destiny as loving spiritual beings. It all begins with the challenging character each one of us holds inside.
John coined Existential Self Inquiry (ESI) as the process described here, a self-relating spiritual journey. In this website and in our personal writings, we use Existential Self Inquiry, Emotional Self Inquiry, Emotional Self Reflection, Affective Self Return and Intuitive Self Inquiry interchangeably with their acronyms.
Quoting John from Humanizing Technology in the Western World:
ESI is a spirituality of the reflexive self, which can simply look back upon itself throughout its history to inquire of that which has been missing in its mood. Looking back upon itself is inherently social. In one’s self-inquiry, one can hold onto remembered occasions. Remembered occasions are filled with other selves...the reflexive self when looking back can slide into its mood to be with and speak to anyone in it. This social way of speaking within one’s mood is akin to the way of religious prayer, with the notable difference that within one’s mood one is speaking inwardly, and not to another who would be dwelling outside one’s self. It is an exceedingly powerful personal capability. But it is a capability attending exclusively to inquiry of that which has been missing in one’s mood. It can generate new and heartfelt emotion. For all having an enduring interest in the concept of selfhood and its fate, it is a capability worthy of careful consideration…staying with that which has been missing in its mood, the inquiring self can find itself being carried along in that mood and its many stories. Then one can hold onto remembered moments and let their felt dramas absorb one’s focal awareness. Entering these stories by speaking aloud to their participants in the precise way of feeling in that moment, the reflexive self in its self-inquiry can learn the ways of emotional intelligence.
Our Flight from Selfhood
Welcome to the writing of John Lonsbury. He defines Selfhood as the way of Being of one’s hidden self.
Understanding this work and one's relation to oneself requires only a beating heart and more than a little courage. The writing points to the evolutionary character of human emotion and to our precious structure of care.
The book itself is an extremely challenging read. It is written in the form of a long poem and requires the reader to learn an extensive vocabulary found in the glossary. On Reading Our Flight From Selfhood is a primer for the book.
Quoting John from Existential Self-Inquiry:
It is here, deep in self-reflection, that the genetic structure of emotion in a mood begins to clearly manifest itself to the inquirer. In these early moments of recognition, the self begins to increasingly find new ways of previously unexpressed feeling regarding progenitors. These are but the source of many subsequent ways of feeling in reflection which eventually lead to a great temple of the most profound meanings ever known to each reporting practitioner. I find these reflections leading to moments of sacred meaning. They encompass all that has been missing. They enrapture the heart panting through years of absence. They inspire visions of the most heartfelt ideals. They provide the self with a deeply personal place to belong and to be with itself. They teach the self how to accept and be accepted by way of learning how to love and be loved in everyday life.
Lonsbury interview Video
In this video (and throughout this site) John asserts that we humans can creatively engage our inner life by taking time to look back in reflection; that our self relation comes alive through emotional expression. With practice, personal emotional intelligence can be cultivated. It is not to be forced. It is as natural to us as breathing. Please keep in mind as you attempt to groc this, that John is pointing to our moodlife, that other side, brimming with emotional meaning underlying everything we say, think or do. Emotional baggage (so often called) cannot be demonized or dismissed. The narrative of each person's daily lived emotion must be engaged.
Audio recordings
Lonsbury History
John was keenly interested in philosophy in graduate school and began to explore personal emotional life during his years first as a client, then as a “listener” at the Primal Institute in L.A. with Dr. Arthur Janov. In 1972, John founded the Center for Being in Berkeley, CA., where he continued his listening practice and intensive studies of Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Charles Taylor, et. al. You will find some early articles: Inside Primal Therapy and American Individualism. The Richardson article addresses Heidegger’s call for an Existential Interpretation of the Analytic of Dasein, of particular interest to Heidegger/philosophy scholars.
Heidegger and Philosophical References
Here you get a sense of Lonsbury (and Heidegger) in the evolution of philosophy and phenomenology. A deeper dive can be found in his article Humanism and Selfhood where he cites Charles Taylor extensively. Heidegger’s work, What is Called Thinking, published in 1954, illuminates the provocative observation that “we can learn thinking only if we radically unlearn what thinking has been traditionally”. “This is why it remains the exclusive privilege of the greatest thinkers to let themselves be influenced”.
Heidegger lived in the time of the first nuclear bombs and the arms race. Read his Discourse On Thinking particularly the Memorial Address. His concern for the relation of our mood life and our technologies pervades his (and John’s) works.
An article by Emmy van Deurzen will help the reader make a distinction between philosophy and our current practice of psychology.
Ken Miller addresses the efforts to marry Heidegger’s philosophy and Nazi-ism as: mired in “proofs”, they miss the Ontological Difference, his gift to our understanding of humanity.
Heidegger and Mood
Here are abstracts/introductions to articles we have submitted recently to the Heidegger Circle (a group dedicated to the study of his philosophy). You may find them helpful as a short form overview.
Heidegger and Mood for Kuravsky Anthology (Note that Heidegger and Selfhood renamed for this submittal)
Gateway Openers
Our culture (western and beyond) has always been (and is growing more) interested in learning through personal experiences enhanced by various mind altering substances. Michael Pollan has been a recent leader here as have many others, invoking “something that lives far outside and out of reach of empirical manipulation”. Carl Sagan also has wonderful insights.
As you study this site, you will see that while we recognize the “inner-eye” opening benefits of entheogens, psychedelics, and marijuana, we do not here promote any particular gateway substances. Rather we wish to seed the possibilities of our emotional way of being as not yet experienced or understood, living still in its evolutionary infancy. We wish to show that this understanding is of great personal import to everyone and of critical import to managing our technology and culture.
Our Offerings
We have created a quiet private chamber in McKinleyville, California where an experienced listener is available to be with you as you tune in to your emotional way in a safe, protected environment. We do not offer therapy or any kind of counseling, only an experienced companion for your own journey. To begin, we recommend a period of several weeks where you will keep a personal journal, remove yourself from contact with others and avoid all drugs and habits that may serve to dampen your emotional life. We offer this experience at no charge to accepted candidates.
Collectively, we three — Don Mill, Ken Miller and Meighan O’Brien — have over 100 years of experience with John Lonsbury. Our mission is to provide the opportunity for persons who “get” what we are offering to get what we are offering. We seek people who yearn to experience their own feelings with the deep satisfaction that they can offer. We daresay this is the universal human desire.
This is not about smart insightfulness but rather about finding, in a moment of time, a personal place of emotional being that is trustworthy and doubt-free. This capability can be astonishing and intimate. We wish to attract those who are better positioned than we, by virtue of age or competency, to promote ISI, because we understand that our way of thinking must evolve along these ontological lines if we are to thrive and survive. For the academic, we offer the Existential Interpretation of the Analytic of Dasein, as prefigured by Heidegger and realized by John Lonsbury.