Reply to comment

Lots of thoughts from our two weeks together about ways to teach less wrong (be sure to make time/incentive for group work), about how to teach particularly things less wrong (build up to computer use, rather than simply make it available), and about things to think more about.

Among the latter, I'm still mulling Adi's concern about "My knee hurts" as a primary story. Is "my knee feels warm, my knee tingles" and so on (as one might learn to perceive it in meditative practice) actually a series of still more primary stories from which "My knee hurts" derives?

Part of why this question grabs me is that it parallels a question in scientific inquiry. Are "observations" primary and "interpretations" derived? In any absolute sense? In practice? And if only in the latter, is the distinction useful? My sense is that the distinction isn't real in any absolute sense ("observations" are context-dependent and challengeable, just as stories are), but that it is indeed a useful distinction in practice (cf observation/interpretations/stories and the objectivity/subjectivity spectrum). It facilitates the process of comparing stories to generate new ones. Which may, in turn, create a revised definition of "observations".

My hunch is that the same hold for "my knee hurts." For many people, that is indeed a primary story, a statement about their internal experience beyond which they cannot go. Others though may have still more primary stories and, as Adi points out, they may be helped to have more primary stories by being encouraged to do so ("what kind of pain is it?"). The point is that primary story, like observation, doesn't have a fixed definition, only an operational one. And that one can, as with observation, discover in onself alternative primary stories. There is though still at any given time a primary story (as there is an observation) that derives from the unconscious in ways the I-function/story teller doesn't at that time know about.