Nursing as an Aesthetic Praxis

Abstract

This Thesis focuses on the experience of being human as process in order to reveal being. Illness and health are seen as reflections of this process of revelation. This work argues that health and illness are physical expressions of consciousness and therefore an outcome of what a human being has thought. In this way, this work shows how thought/intent serves to create life in the moment. In this understanding lies the potential to change reality, to change life. The Thesis identifies self-responsibility as the key to changing consciousness. Taking responsibility for the creation of one's reality eliminates the human tendency to blame another for what is experienced in life. To that end, this work argues, we are each free to choose what is felt in response to life. In so doing, we can become conscious that life is a choice approached from either the position of perfection, or excellence. This work argues that as human beings we have grounded thinking in perfection. In this playing out of rights and wrongs, an independent form of surrender, the outcome is the reification of the thought that we are separate from God. I think, therefore I Am. Such thinking it is argued, is the basis of disease and thus illness is an outcome of thought that as experience has been judged. The thesis develops the position that human beings approach life from the position of perfection thereby creating an appraisal from the outcome of life's experiences. Excellence as a state of being creates the appraisal from the effort of an outcome. Thus excellence, is to experience life as an Isness, and then make a conscious choice to feel love. Perfection makes a judgement about life, and so pronounce life and therefore thinking as good and bad, or right and wrong. In the understanding that human beings are the creators of their reality, it is possible to conceive of care in nursing that is directed at changing thinking/thought. Such change would be to focus on the excellence of life, and in that way enact care in nursing that is an enabling through a process of being that is an emotional allowance in response to life. To this end, this work is titled Nursing as an Aesthetic Praxis. The aesthetic is emotion and feeling. Praxis, is presented in its dialectical relationship of thought and action that is then bound to emotion and feeling in such a way that it illuminates the nature of thinking. This way of thinking, this work shows, is transformatory. Where transformation is a process of being that as a state of excellence is one of incremental human freedom accompanied by incremental responsibility.