KMC Forums - Body-mind

Body-mind

Quickie from wiki: “A symbol is something such as an object, picture, written word, sound, or particular mark that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention. For example, a red octagon may stand for "STOP". On maps, crossed sabers may indicate a battlefield. Numerals are symbols for numbers.

All language consists of symbols. The word "cat" is not a cat, but represents the idea of a cat.

Psychology has found that people, and even animals, can respond to symbols as if they were the objects they represent. Pavlov's dogs salivated when they heard a sound which they associated with food, even if there was no food.”

Nixon said “I am not a crook”, immediately everyone thought of Nixon as a crook.

“I am pro-life” and everyone thinks of me as a person who has great respect for life.

“I am pro-choice” and everyone thinks of me as a person who has great regard for freedom of choice.

“Don’t think of an elephant” and everyone starts thinking about an elephant.

When I speak of mind almost everyone thinks of a stand alone entity functioning in a logical manner in which the body is merely a house for its place of habitation until death, at which time it, sometimes called the soul, floats away to a spiritual kingdom.

I have coined the word body-mind, which I first discovered by reading Mark Johnson’s book The Meaning of the Body, because I wish the reader to think not of the mind as a separate entity residing in the body but because I want the reader to think of a body-mind gestalt. That is to say that the mind is an embodied mind, which cannot stand alone just as the heart cannot stand alone with the body bracketed.

Quickie from Wiki: “The psychologist, Carl Jung, who studied archetypes, proposed an alternative definition of symbol, distinguishing it from the term "sign". In Jung's view, a sign stands for something known, as a word stands for its referent. He contrasted this with symbol, which he used to stand for something that is unknown and that cannot be made clear or precise.”