The Youniverse: The Spirit of the Twenty-First Century Fifth Edition

By Jesse James Thomas

The Youniverse introduces you to major movements of our millennium in psychology, science, technology, arts, and religion in a way that is readable and pertinent to everyday life. This means that what happens inside you becomes embedded in what happens outside you and vice versa as you interact with your surroundings. The book is full of Comment

• Language: English
• Publisher: Go To Publish
• Release date: Aug 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647492069

Jesse James Thomas

Dr. Thomas is now a now retired university professor and psychologist with a Ph.D. at Northwestern University and post-graduate certification at the Gestalt Institute. He has written 3 books, all of which have new editions in process. A new one is also be available next year. In addition he has written many papers for academic/scientific conferences and journals. His unique talent is his ability to relate diverse subjects in a wide variety of subjects in creative and often witty and humorous ways. He writes for a wide variety of readers utilizing his warm and pleasant personality.

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The Youniverse

Copyright © 2020 by Jesse James Thomas

ISBN: 978-1-64749-206-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions.No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.

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Cover Design by Katy Blanchard

Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

PRELUDE TO PART I

PART I

PART I

PART III

A LUISENO CREATION STORY

SOURCES

Janes Dublin in Voices: The Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists (on the 2002 and 2011 Editions of The Youniverse): The Youniverse is a straightforward and beautifully written primer of consciousness-awareness expanding. Add this easy to read book to your library.

Jessie Bernard, author of The Future of Marriage: In Marriage and Its Values Jesse Thomas has learned to profit from marital research. And he is blessed with a temperament well qualified for his work. More power to him.

Catherine O’Neill in the Washington Post: concerning Dr, T’s Theraputic Bedtime Stories (of which there is one at the end of Youniverse): Characters in his tapes try out his techniques - and they work! Before you know it, you’ll be drifting off . . . Sweet Dreams.

For my wife:

Bonnie Grihalva Thomas

1940-2010

I know there’s a place you walked

Where love falls from the trees

The Who

Twinkle twinkle little star. How I wonder what you are.

Up above the world so high. Like a diamond in the sky.

Twinkle twinkle little star. How I wonder who you are.

Up above the world so high. Like an angel in the sky.

Traditional Nursery Song (slightly altered)

I began to think of the soul as if it were a spherical castle made of a single diamond

Or of a very clear crystal, in which there were many rooms, a crystal reflecting the sun.

Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle

Imagine gazing at the World Wide Web from far in space,

to you peering through your telescope,

mapping the mazes of electromagnetism in its path,

the Web appears as a global efflorescence,

a resonant sphere of light.

George Gilder, The Brightest Star, Forbes ASAP

PREFACE

If you don’t like stories, don’t read this book. If you do, I warn you that the book is full of Stories interspersed with Comments and Exercises. It delves into the depths of Experience. It is not for sake of establishing Objective Definitions about things but to Embody things in your daily Experience of Life .

The title is Youniverse because You are Involved In the Universe, which in turn Embodies you in the emerging Spirit of the 21st century.

The basic Image here is the 6 pointed star on the cover of this book, and descriptions of (1) How Parts of the star are Different yet Belong within ihe Whole, (2) How those Parts Interrelate to each other, and (3) How they Act Outwardly to Transform our Surroundings. All Three Parts are crucial to Life itself in stars or ourselves.

The original market for this book was college students and classes I taught for over 30 years. The new edition, however, is designed for a wider audience. It occasionally deals with complex academic theories, but always in order to clarify important Experiential Fields, into which the Stories, Comments, and Exercises are blended.

Youniverse in the 1977 edition was the first time the term Youniverse has been used, although several writers and products have used it for commercial purposes since then. It is a new way to relate subject (person) and object (book or product) to help these two terms overlap, no matter what the topic.

Such overlaps merge within you and beyond you into the natural and social world surrounding you, including feelings, thoughts, and behavior, none of which have meaning without each other.

An increasing number of thinkers and practitioners in a wide variety of fields have made enormous progress in understanding and practicing the Science of Experience in not only science but psychology, technology, philosophy, business, religion, culture, arts, etc.

There are common models in many of these fields that specialists have developed, often independently. It is in the similarities of these models and paradigms that this book deals, without denying occasional disagreements in these fields, so this book is not therefore meant as a Huck Finn whitewash job of making everything look identical that is not. But although Nature and Culture seldom agree totally with each other, they manage to get along, and so will we when possible in this book.

Since the topic is Experience, our method is naturally very Experiential. In order to understand things, we need to get closer to them, feel them, and attempt to do things with them to know what they really are. That is why we need Stories, Comments, and Exercises, which I try to balance as we proceed from one Part of the book to another in efforts to Embody your thoughts, feelings and behavior into the one person you are.

So whatever the particular subject, we will not be talking about something from an intelectual distance but feeling things inside and doing things outside actively in a wide variety of ways to help you function in our complex world today.

Note: This also means that we face both humorous and serious Experiences. Since we are Americans, several of the Stories are influenced directly or indirectly by Mark Twain and other American humorists. Hope that is OK with you. In the biz so to speak this is called Bas Relief.

The Stories, Comments, and Exercises encourage feeling, thought, and action whether positive or negative, which is encouraged. You may respond with some difficulty in 6x9 paperbacks and even more so in e-books, but I always try when possible to involve the use your body, not just your grey-matter brain, in responding the way I used to require my students to.

In any case, do what fits for you, from using little note pads to writing whatever on the back of your mind. And you don’t have to do any more of the exercises than you want to.

However, they are meant to spur your embodied response. If you like, you can even send one or two of your responses to me at [e-mail] to let me know how you feel, think, or have done, or simply blow off some steam. Just write Youniverse on the title line so I don’t miss you. You may even get an email back from me that your notions may appear in the next Edition. This is the 5th Edition but I may live long enough for another one or two.

INTRODUCTION

COMMENTS

The subtitle of this book is The Spirit of the 21 st Century , which raises the question of what is meant by Spirit , which is obviously a broader term than Religion, yet has a relationship of sorts with it. What they have in common? Consider this: Both solve the problem of how to relate subjectivity and objectivity by primarily putting things experientially rather than rationally , as scientists and philosophers traditionally do. Spirit is one step forward from Experience.

Primal prehistorical cultures overlap music, song, dance, painting, sculpture, sports, politics, athletics, and religion, all of which are primarily experiential and spirit-filled. In fact experience and spirit stretches all the way to the edge of ethics and science even today. Experience and Spirit drive all cultures. In order to proceed with this, most countries have National Spirits.

More about this in the 2020 edition of Embodiment. In primal life they all Participate in powerful and experiential ways for the common good. There are frequently such moments in today’s world, as you may notice while reading this book.

Now back to distinctly religious notions. Mircea Eliade says: "Hierophanies (manifestations of the sacred) have the peculiarity of seeking to reveal the sacred in its totality (Italics mine), even if the human beings in whose consciousness the sacred shows itself fasten on only one aspect or small part of things. In the most elementary hierophany everything is declared" (1972, p. xvii). Eliade obviously has a point here when we try to define someone having a distinctly religious experience (an Everything Experience) concerning Spirit or Sacred things like art, in fact virtually all primal experience. Are we really all that different today? Tell me after you read the first Story after the beginning of Part 1.

Experience is always getting caught up in Transformation Experiences, which is the root of Everything,

Subject and object in primal life do not have any very clear distinction between the two, which Eliade appears to assume. Take a more civilized religious experience as an example. When the Apostle Paul falls off his horse, how much of his life and experience is transformed, and how many places he visits are transformed, including those to whom he preaches? Now, how different is today in terms of what is being said here than in primal cultures?

Philosophy and psychology today often speak in similar language concerning the meaning of Perception itself that lies at the heart of all experience, whether primal or today. Traditional philosophy spoke about Experience from somewhere above or beyond it. It was in other words a Top-Down rather than Bottom-Up Analysis. It did not speak directly from Experience itself. In contrast, what has fascinated many philosophers and psychologists for the last century describe fuzzy territory between subject and object, which leads to the problem of how distinct definitions of either Experience or Perceptions can be made.

This may sound like a very complex issue, but it is very important, In actually clear applications in how we understand, it Involves not only Experience and Perception but Life itself. That is the most important theme in this book, and we have plenty of time to absorb this with Common Sense with or without elaborate Theories.

For example, how many scientists and others people today find science experientially Awesome, a very spiritual term. I mean, give me a break here, folks. Granted that many scientist can’t stand religious people who don’t believe in Evolution and vice versa. Is Evolution all that different from the basic themes in the Bible’s Creation stories. We will come back to that issue big-time near the end of this book.

The philosophy called Existentialism had very interesting beginnings in the early 20th century, as did a related movement called phenomenology, which is defined by its founder Edmund Husserl as the Science of Experience (1962 [originally 1913). We will take up the philosophical side of the question as we go along, because every experience can transform or reshape our world as we experience it. That does not mean that there is only subjectivity and no objectivity, but it does blur the distinction between them.

Am I getting too philosophical? If so, don’t worry about it. We will come back to this general territory occasionally as we proceed. We will get into science and other issues as well. In any case, you have plenty of time to think about it. There is no big rush. And you may decide, of course, that I am wrong about all this. That is always possible. Bless your heart, as my Grandma would say to me: You will believe whatever you believe." All of us are where we are. Right?

EXERCISE

A. Which of the following describe(s) your reaction to this Introduction so far.

______ You are weird, Dr. T. I don’t know what to make of what you are saying. But as you say, there is no rush. And I know you are not trying to shove something down my throat.

______ You are weird, Dr. T. I don’t know what to make of what you are saying. But I can’t help thinking that you are trying to sneak something into this that you are not saying. So I will wait and see.

______ I already know that you are wrong about this, Dr.T. It is quite possible to not only prove that something is objectively out there somewhere, but exactly what it is. Objects can be clearly defined, just like subjects can.

______ I know one thing, Dr. T, which is that God is out there. So I hope that is compatible with what you are trying to say.

______ I take it as a matter of common sense that certain things are out there, and I think we can not only know that they are but that we can’t know exactly what they are.

______ I guess what you are saying is that you don’t deny that things are out there, whether God or anything else is, but that the only way we can describe it is how we experience it.

______Whether you are right or wrong does not really make any difference unless you can show me as we proceed that it does makes some practical difference to me. It is just too early to agree or disagree here.

_______________________________________________________________________

B. Evaluate the basic ideas in this Introduction from your own point of view so far.

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PRELUDE TO PART I

In a dream from long ago I am visiting the home of a famous therapist whom I take to be one of the wisest in the world. He welcomes me and makes me feel quite at home. During our conversation I ask him to identify what he would guess is the biggest problem I have to work on in my life. He reflects for a few moments. Then he smiles and says: Your main problem now is that you have a secret.

This surprises me and I reply: I don’t understand. I don’t really have many secrets, certainly compared to most people. If anything I tend to disclose too much about myself. Again he smiles and says: "You don’t understand. This secret is not a secret about yourself. Nor is it something that happened to you. Nor is it something you have done.

It is a such a secret that you have hidden it even from yourself. You don’t even know you have it. He waits for a few moments and then says: It is a Part of you that you don’t even know is there. You are not alone in this respect. The world is full of humans with such secrets.

Although I do not understand at all what he means, I thank him for his input. At least I have enough sense not to tell him I will think about it. As I leave his house, I know it is Experience that will teach me what he says, but I have