A Personal Path to Universal Personhood Anthony L Rose, Ph.D. / CSP Biosynergy Institute 1. ALL PATHS LEAD TO THE PERSON A half century ago I came to La Jolla to sit by the side of a man who had offered an alternative path for psychologists. A positive path. A soft path. A path with heart. A personal path that, for me, has wound ‘round the world, exploring the myriad manifestations of personhood beyond humanity to all living beings. In celebration of CSP’s 50 th Anniversary, Will Stillwell has given us the gift of his inspired work – Psychotherapy of Carl Rogers: How It Seems To Me – an intimate look into the personal approach to psychotherapy taken by that man – Carl Rogers. Thanks to Will for finding the perfect place to begin our exploration of the diverse personcentered activities that have emerged from Center for Studies of the Person during our first halfcentury of wisdom and healing. While many members of CSP have worked in fields other than psychotherapy, we’ve all tried to ply our trades with our own personal adaptations of personcentered process. If personcentered psychotherapy is the foundation on which CSP was built, I’d venture to say that my personcentered path has moved the farthest from our original therapeutic base. For over three decades I have roamed six continents investigating, innovating, and promoting personcentered approaches to the study, care and conservation of wildlife and wilderness. For whatever time I have left, I will be working within CSP to study personhood in other animals and to support personcentered restoration of Biosynergy – the synergy of all living beings. I met Carl Rogers in 1967 while finishing doctoral research on the neuropsychology of alcohol abuse at UCLA’s Brain Research Institute. When I learned Rogers was about to conduct a weeklong Encounter Group with clinical psychology grad students, I decided to crash the party. Despite having spent six years in a laboratory with monkeys and rats, my empathy and authenticity impressed Carl: he suggested I apply for a postdoctoral fellowship with him. Six months later I was an NIMH Fellow at Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI). As a behaviorist who had implemented UCLA’s first laboratory course in animal learning and induced experimental alcoholism in monkeys, adopting Rogers’ positive personcentered approach was a profound professional and personal revolution.
Transcript
A Personal Path to Universal Personhood Anthony L Rose, Ph.D. / CSP Biosynergy Institute
1. ALL PATHS LEAD TO THE PERSON
A half century ago I came to La Jolla to sit by the side of a man who had offered an alternative path for psychologists. A positive path. A soft path. A path with heart. A personal path that, for me, has wound ‘round the world, exploring the myriad manifestations of personhood beyond humanity to all living beings.
In celebration of CSP’s 50th Anniversary, Will Stillwell has given us the gift of his inspired work – Psychotherapy of Carl Rogers: How It Seems To Me – an intimate look into the personal approach to psychotherapy taken by that man – Carl Rogers. Thanks to Will for finding the perfect place to begin our exploration of the diverse person-‐centered activities that have emerged from Center for Studies of the Person during our first half-‐century of wisdom and healing. While many members of CSP have worked in fields other than psychotherapy, we’ve all tried to ply our trades with our own personal adaptations of person-‐centered process.
If person-‐centered psychotherapy is the foundation on which CSP was built, I’d venture to say that my person-‐centered path has moved the farthest from our original therapeutic base. For over three decades I have roamed six continents investigating, innovating, and promoting person-‐centered approaches to the study, care and conservation of wildlife and wilderness. For whatever time I have left, I will be working within CSP to study personhood in other animals and to support person-‐centered restoration of Biosynergy – the synergy of all living beings.
I met Carl Rogers in 1967 while finishing doctoral research on the neuropsychology of alcohol abuse at UCLA’s Brain Research Institute. When I learned Rogers was about to conduct a weeklong Encounter Group with clinical psychology grad students, I decided to crash the party. Despite having spent six years in a laboratory with monkeys and rats, my empathy and authenticity impressed Carl: he suggested I apply for a postdoctoral fellowship with him. Six months later I was an NIMH Fellow at Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI). As a behaviorist who had implemented UCLA’s first laboratory course in animal learning and induced experimental alcoholism in monkeys, adopting Rogers’ positive person-‐centered approach was a profound professional and personal revolution.
I was ready! In my encounter group with Carl at UCLA, I had told with teary eyes how a research monkey I’d been tormenting with brain implants and shock training for years had escaped. He was perched atop a bookshelf making a fierce threat display as I entered the lab; he recognized me, leapt into my arms and held on like a child holds his father. I told Carl and the UCLA group how this had driven me to stop experimenting with primates. Later I told my CSP friends how empathy for and recognition of the positive personal core of other animals had made me leave the laboratory, turn down a professorship in comparative psychology, take the WBSI postdoc, and move from reductionist behaviorism to holistic humanism.
During CSP’s first 15 years I was asked to facilitate in scores of situations calling for person-‐centered approaches to individual, social, and organizational change. I adapted person-‐centered psychology to preventing drug abuse on Navy ships, celebrating community in Episcopal parishes, consolidating USFS Ranger Districts and VA hospitals, and installing a huge health-‐care quality of service program at Kaiser-‐Permanente. All the while, I mused on the state of wildlife & nature.
In 1982 I took a break from working with urban humans to trek through Indonesia in search of nonhuman primates. In a Sumatran rainforest, once homeland to my late laboratory monkey, I had another interspecies epiphany – this time with a family of orangutans. They appeared on my third day trekking along narrow muddy paths through thick undergrowth under a lush 100-‐foot high canopy of hardwoods. By chance I stopped to rest, looked up, saw a splash of orange hidden in the green.
Like my escaped monkey, these apes perched above me, looking down from a huge fruit tree. Having never been captured, caged, or tortured by humans, they showed neither hostility nor fear. Mama with babe in arms and youngster on a nearby branch stared at me with more than curiosity. I sensed a mutual longing to connect, and I cooed as I had done when greeting monkey friends 20 years earlier in the lab. Orangutan faces softened; their bodies shifted, leaned closer, into open airspace. Mama orangutan twisted a fig from the vine above her and gently tossed it down to me. That invitation to share fruit sent my mind whirling, my heart beating, my tears falling. I realized why people in diverse cultures across the Indonesian archipelago called these great ape cousins “Orang Utan – Person of the Forest.”
Two months later I returned to Los Angeles and told my staff at Kaiser Permanente that I’d be leaving. Two years later I was out of the corporate world, tracking mountain gorillas in Rwanda, following the path to personhood for all living beings.
For more about Interspecies Epiphanies read: http://bushmeat.net/pdf/tortoisemonkeymen.pdf
2. OTHER ANIMALS ARE POSITIVE, TOO
I don’t recall discussing these experiences with Carl. When I left Kaiser Permanente and returned to CSP in 1984, I doubt he heard about my epiphanies with orangutans and gorillas. He didn’t know I was studying great ape ethology and writing about the positive nature of our common primate personhood. Rogers was involved with cultural and political conflict in the later years of his life; the welfare of humans captured his attention to the end. Had he recognized that human Biodominance would blanket the natural world, threaten to destroy the biosphere and doom the future of civilization, I think Carl would have wanted to join me in the facilitation of all-‐inclusive positive personhood.
As early as 1954 Carl Rogers was signaling his belief that all organisms were subject to the conditions for growth that he and his colleagues had observed in humans.
“Whether one calls it a growth tendency, a drive toward self-‐ actualization, or a forward-‐moving directional tendency, it is the mainspring of life … It is the urge that is evident in all organic and human life—to expand, extend, become autonomous, develop, mature —the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, to the extent that such activation enhances the organism or the self. “ -‐-‐ Carl Rogers, Becoming a Person. Nellie Heldt Lecture, Oberlin College 1954.
I don’t know when Carl began to place the names of other species on his postulation of “organism” self-‐actualization. Thanks to Will Stillwell, we see that he did so eventually. The third video presented by Will in his analysis of Carl’s therapy – Section II. How It Seems To Me – Carl Rogers Video 1985 – shows Carl describing how and why he holds the philosophy that the vast majority of organisms are positive, constructive, and trustworthy persons – persons who wish no harm to others: who seek harmony and feel fundamental good-‐will towards all.
Section II. How It Seems To Me – Carl Rogers Video 1985: http://www.centerfortheperson.org/PoCR/vidplayer.php?vidfile=Close_edit_5
Near the end of the video, Carl talks about the expansion of this unconditional positive regard beyond the sphere of humanity. Here’s what he says:
“… many people believe that people are basically evil. In my experience that is not the case. … as you peel aside the layers … you find that at the core the person is trustworthy and constructive, not negative and evil. … as you get to know people more and more deeply, if you find persons are basically trustworthy … then you decide human nature is basically positive.
A deer or a bear or a lion – or whatever – they’re positive. They may kill animals for food; do various things that seem harsh. But it’s not anything evil in their nature. It’s a constructive aspect of trying to preserve life.”
There it is! In 1985 Carl Rogers proposed that not only “human nature is basically positive. … animal nature is positive, too.”
What Carl had offered as a generic hypothesis about “the organism” was pretty radical in 1954. What he later affirmed with actual animal names was less risky in 1985. By then wildlife protection and animal welfare were popular causes. I had begun promoting the positive treatment of non-‐humans years earlier. In 1968 (while we were incorporating CSP) I gave a talk about my alcoholism research at the Western Psychological Association meetings in San Diego. After a quick review of my scientific findings, I argued that such research was unethical. I echoed Carl’s early positive view of “all organic life” and foreshadowed his thoughts presented on the 1985 video with my own profound experience with monkeys. I declared:
As I got to know other animals more and more deeply, as I found they are basically trustworthy … then I decided all animals are basically positive.
When CSP was being founded in 1968, I already knew monkeys deeply enough to postulate their positive nature. My involvement with wild and captive great apes in the ‘80s and ‘90s confirmed their well-‐documented positive “humane” ways of being. Nobody who knew me in 1994 was surprised to learn I was returning to Indonesia to lead a round-‐table discussion on “Ethical Challenges to Primate Research & Conservation.” The International Primatological Society members who participated in that session were surprised by my opening salvo – a talk entitled “Paradigms for Personhood in the Age of atonement.” The other panelists already knew my thesis and were elated to have me proposing it. After three hours of exciting give and take, the consensus favoring non-‐human primate personhood was strong. Given the stolid opposition from a small band of reductionists, Speciesists, and selfish-‐gene theorists, the majority stood to cheer my offer to carry the flag.
Now, after 24 ensuing years engaged in the study, service and salvation of all kinds of animal-‐persons – apes and monkeys, elephants and rhinos, porpoises and whales, coyotes and wolves, wild dogs and hyenas, horses and buffalo, leopards and lions, tigers and cheetah, pangolin and porcupine, and many more – I bring the Flag of Animal Personhood, washed clean of the blood and smoke of scores of battles, and plant it here at the Center for Studies of the Person.
3. NEW PARADIGMS FOR PERSONHOOD Since the 1994 founding of The Biosynergy Institute, our theories and visions, research and innovations, achievements and ongoing programs have evolved in effects, vision, and potential. Next year a new CSP Biosynergy Institute website will be launched to stand with the Center’s other Internet offerings. There you’ll find a large assortment of articles, essays, poetry and science, video and photos to document the scope of our efforts to enable biosynergy in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. CSP’s Biosynergy Institute will have projects in Interspecies Bonding, Empathy Education, Biosynergy Conservation, Compassionate Caregiving, Synergy Science, and more. There will be lifetimes of possibilities for us to explore together.
In the preceding pages I’ve told the personal story of my involvement with Carl Rogers, emphasizing our shared view of the positive nature of humanity and of all living organisms. I’ve recounted my profound early involvement with non-‐human primates whose personhood I am certain Carl would support. And I’ve more than hinted at the importance of Biosynergy, and encouraged you to join the cause.
Now, I’d like to end at the beginning. The speech I used to introduce myself to the primatologists in Bali is still unpublished. I’ll paste it below – “New Paradigms for Personhood” – is my gift to celebrate CSP’s rebirth into it’s second half-‐century.
… With Synergy for All – Tony Rose
Cheetah Rescued in Kenya Gorilla Orphan in Cameroon Elephant Skull in Zimbabwe
NEW PARADIGMS FOR PERSONHOOD IN THE AGE OF ATONEMENT
Talk at International Primatological Society Congress
Anthony L. Rose, Ph.D. CSP Biosynergy Institute La Jolla, California USA
The leaders of every generation and every society have seen themselves as living at the pinnacle and the abyss of human history. We like to believe it is the best and the worst of times. This human aggrandizement is an artifact of our centricities – ego, ethno, and anthropo. It is what stirs the creation of tools, of cultures, of cosmologies. It is what fires the destruction of resources, life, faith. While waves of selfishness grow and engulf the most common of men, a counter current of humility persists. The venerable Tao feeds the green movement. Ahimsa ignites animal rights. Quan Yin appears as Mother Theresa on the streets of Calcutta. In America we see ourselves on television as burglar and cop, as ape and woodcutter, as Ishmael and Moby Dick. In time the fragments become a mosaic, unity emerges from diversity, and the age of atonement (at-‐ONE-‐ment) manifests. Out of that age emerge new paradigms for personhood. Paradigms that take us beyond legal, moral, or psychosocial projections of human self-‐concern onto other organisms. Paradigms that recognize that all boundaries are permeable, no hierarchies are valid, all life forms are intelligent, no individuals are without culture, each earthling is a god force, and every being is a numinous intersection in the web of life. Personhood is imbued, then, in every ant and every ape. We can rule out no one. We can ignore no one. We must atone to all beings in accord with their definitions of our sins. For our species, the new standard we must address first is: no hierarchies are valid. By this I mean that there is no bit or amalgam of energy, matter, or spirit more important inherently than any other. Among the various forms of life there is no better and worse, no supreme and ignoble, no higher and lower. We know this in astronomy, in physics, in elemental chemistry, in everything that has to do with what we have come to think of as inanimate matter. But when we invest things with life, we immediately begin inventing hierarchies. The reasons for this are many -‐ because our societies teach us, because it makes us feel important and strong/safe, because we’re civilized predators, because we've separated from nature and have constructed rationales to help us cope with our grief.
Truth is – everything is important, everything is noble, everything matters as much as everything else. We invent winners and losers because we are shortsighted, narrow-‐minded, or misguided. We strive for personal excellence because we don't recognize the profound potential for interpersonal synergy. We toy with chaos because we’ve turned our backs on harmony. We slice off options with Occam's razor; pretending simplicity is truth, rather than just another theoretical bias. I admit to my biases and openly promote them -‐-‐ to replace chaos with harmony, conflict with interdependence, need with incentive, competition with cooperation, humanism with biosynergy. I have devoted my life to these paradigm shifts in the human community. I now believe that we must make the same shifts in our consideration of life as a whole. We must expand beyond one-‐way “biophilia” – beyond what Wilson called "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms"1. We must celebrate the interactive power of affiliation: the biosynergy of all of nature. We need more than to affirm our human love of life. We need to declare that love is the essence of life. We must dismantle our false hierarchies and build new conceptual structures that support a harmonious biology of equally important and mutually loving creatures. This will require us to transcend faulty null hypotheses and decisively argue for a world that is more than those dull simplicities that our scientific method has failed to reject. We must recognize that altruism and cooperation are not merely hypothetical constructs. They are real phenomena that we can and must make to work in a real world, because they enrich the diversity and quality of life. I have spent nearly three decades synergizing human relations in the workplace: I know this is true for humans. I believe it is also true among all species, whose ancestors have lived together in harmonic balance for millions of years. It is time to channel our energies into applied research that stimulates collaborative action. It is time to foster humanity's altruistic involvement in a natural world that stands ready to welcome and appreciate our mutual affinities. I support the call for positive action made by Michael Soule in the final chapter of Kellert & Wilson's Biophilia Hypothesis when he states the need for a "religion-‐like movement ... that ... can create the political momentum required to overcome the greed ... and the anthropocentrism that underlies the intentional abuse of nature."2
There are many who have suggested that science and humanism have become powerful religions. If so, then we must recognize that we are the priests without collars, the monks without robes, the demigods and demigoddesses who have a duty to become more than cool and objective, less than aloof and self-‐aggrandizing. Our children and the children of every ape and ant on planet earth are counting on us to bring Love and Nature back into focus. In so doing we will affirm the interdependence of all beings, races, species, nations, ecosystems, hemispheres. We will embrace crisis as opportunity, recognize ignorance as mystery, and revere the personhood of every seed and flower, each infant and elder, not only for its singular elegance, but for the wonder that can arise from its biosynergy3 with us and with all the kindred spirits of our remarkable age. Anthony L. Rose, Ph.D. Position Statement for Panel Discussion Ethical Challenges to Research & Conservation XVth Congress, International Primatological Society August 8th, 1994 – Kuta, Bali, Indonesia
CITATIONS 1. Edward O. Wilson, 1993. Biophilia and the conservation ethic; In S. R. Kellert & E. O. Wilson, The Biophilia Hypothesis, Island Press, Washington, D.C.: P. 31. 2. Michael E. Soule, 1993. Biophilia : unanswered questions; In S. R. Kellert & E. O. Wilson, The Biophilia Hypothesis, Island Press, Washington, D.C.: Pp. 441-‐455. 3. Anthony L. Rose, 2007. Biosynergy: The synergy of life; In M. Beckoff, Encyclopedia of Human Animal Relationships, Volume 1, Greenwood publishing, Westport CT; Pp 123-‐129.
"The mind clouded by delusions has wrongly divided reality into self and other, subject and object, birth and death – the clouds imprison us, they are the jailor and their name is ignorance." (Thich Nhat Hanh)
