David Teachout's Blog, page 26

Freedom From, Not Freedom To Do

I would be remiss in my writing if, on the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day I did not write something, though more than the social pressure of doing so is a bone-deep appreciation for the trials and tribulations such a man went through without recourse to violence. For all my talk of serenity and humility, my work on the reduction of anger and judgment, all it often takes is a few minutes behind the wheel of my car and that journey is takes a sharp turn in a distinctly un-serene direction. Here is a man who was hit, spit on and suffered enormous indignities that most of us today would consider fictional were they not so well documented, such is our abject disgust for the actions. I could not and do not hope to achieve the eloquence and sheer magnetic quality of King’s speech but one message that stands out to me today is this:

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Technological innovation has ushered in an age which provided for us the Enlightenment and Renaissance, the Romantic Period and what I may very take to calling the Age of the Internet. Until recently however the technical and scientific enterprise, without denying the profound help that it has brought to the physical welfare of very nearly the entire human race, did more than help us differentiate our ways of knowing and parse out nature into ever-more manipulatable finer points but it dissociated us from each other and denied the underlying spiritual truths that religions often merely brush by, picking up particles but never the whole thing. Freedom has long been characterized as the ability to do something, leading a character in the movie “Jurassic Park” to remark that we only focused on the fact that we could do something, not on whether we should. We soar with wings of titanium and forget the glory of the birds, we land on the moon and forget that our place in the universe is but one far-flung speck in the universe, and we cure disease and map the genome and yet forget that we are all truly and incredibly interconnected in an integral reality.

The current age, that of the Internet or Information or Knowledge, holds the promise of bridging the divide brought about dissociation and remind us of our integrated differentiation, of parts that create by nature of their being ever greater wholes. As Wiliam Ury notes in The Third Side, “Humanity is returning to a dependence on a basic resource that is, as in hunter-gatherer times, an expandable pie. We are returning to the horizontal relationships that existed among human beings for most of human evolution. The network is once again becoming the defining social organization for the human community.” This is not to make the mistake of so many liberal mystics and decry technology for a return to nature as of old. The hunter-gatherer is not a way of life without problems; very little freedom from tyranny, very little freedom from superstition and fear, very little freedom of self-expression for women and minorities and very little freedom from ignorance. What is simply being acknowledged is an appreciation of a world in which the principle resource object was expandable and the networks that characterized such a reality. Information is now our expandable resource, breaking barriers and old ways of thinking, undoubtedly why the few despotic regimes that still exist attempt so hard to control it. But like roving bands following the movements of their food/clothing source, so the human race can and does find ways to access the sum-total of human knowledge, whether through smart phone or wind-up-powered computer.

I have spoken here in terms of freedom from and want to explain further. We can travel faster and farther than ever before and hence possess and freedom to do something, but it is small in the face of being free from oppression and ideological despotism, where one’s sense of importance and grandeur is forever dampened by the darkening influence of a philosophy of separation and brokenness. Whether this takes the form of conservative religious ideologies or political/social form like fascism, the result is a limiting of space to hold real freedom. We may have the freedom, some of us, to play video games for hours on end or watch endless television shows, having the technological know-how and acumen to do so, it is for naught if we are doing so to escape the terrifying reality that we do not possess the freedom from moral and existential castration, of being cut-off from our human potential.

This freedom from is precisely what Obama in his inaugural address today spoke to when he said: "The commitments we make to each other -- through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security -- these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.” Such programs and the underlying social cohesiveness that underlies them addresses both the reality of a social experiment in which none of us progress without the usage of resources that we all provide and had a hand in creating and a recognition that the greatness of the human condition is made possible by the freedom from caring about basic needs and thus to use our ever-widening conscious power to create.

What a focus on the freedom to do does is limit our imagination for we expend our awareness only on the myopic vision of a single action, forgetting that everything we do not yet know is an infinite expanse awaiting its realization and instantiation. This is why dialogue or communal action is the foundation of a truly free society, taking from the infinite resource of information and expanding into the frontiers of the until-now unknown. As William Ury states, again from The Third Side, “…dialogues aim not to convert others or to reach agreement on the issues, but rather to promote mutual understanding and build relationships that can prevent escalation into violence." The freedom to do something, while often fully valid, is not the greater freedom, it merely points to the view we hold of the world, whether it be one of limit and dissociation or one of expansiveness and integration. We can, as King noted, learn to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters.

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“Journeys Of A Spiritual Atheist” is available on Kindle and Nook. It is a collection of the entries from 2012 organized into themes and them put in order to help with the flow of information.

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Yes These Are The Emotions You're Looking For

Recently the sheer power of the human emotional life has been made apparent in stark personal ways, both in people I am close to and in recent headlines parading around from the weird/ridiculous/horrible events out of Notre Dame and fake/real dating to the flare up in the gun control pontifications (I hesitate to call it a true debate as it almost always boils down to lobbing verbal bombs at the other party rather than real engagement). We humans, even those who think they’ve transcended that status, are emotional creatures. Hmm…I’ll file that last sentence into the folder of absolutely stupendously profoundly obvious points and move on. The emotional lives of our fellow life-inmates are as powerful as they are ubiquitous. We revel in the tearful confessions and get angry when there aren’t enough tears (seriously Lance Armstrong?); we read romance novel fluff and escape into the distorted lives of people we’d find disgusting were we to meet them in person and we turn on daily to the constant stream of “real life” portrayals of drama and chaos found on everything from docudramas to the truly fake reality shows. Throughout it all we are so constantly bombarded by emotional data that were it slime we’d be incapable of movement so encased in the sludge we’d be.

Rather disturbing and gross image above I realize. Here’s another one, referencing the movie “What The Bleep Do We Know?” While I cannot say enough how intellectually dishonest this movie is, there is a scene when the central character is dancing and having a crazy good time at a wedding with cartoons overlaying the shot indicating how she’s holding onto the IV line of her emotions which are flooding into her with every movement and touch, the emotions scampering about like squirrels on crack. I have yet to find a more potent portrayal of our emotional lives and how they overwhelm our systems with the sheer high of feeling, no matter what that feeling may be. Showcasing emotions like drugs is precisely what is going on and should give us pause when getting down on ourselves when we’re not feeling what we’re “supposed” to be or what “we want to be.”

We’ve all been there and seen others go through it as well, those moments of depression or anger or bliss that overwhelm the senses and paint the world with all the skill of exploding balloons. We do things when under the spell which in other circumstances we likely would not have and the almost inevitable castigation that follows is yet another emotional reaction though for some bizarre reason we often assume this is more real than the previous effusiveness. Whatever is going on here? Imagine for a moment a ball bobbing upon water held in a box with plenty of room between it and the top. Peaceful, serene, the ball just sits there, slowly moving as it floats upon the water. Then hook up a hose to the box and start shooting in more water from below. The ball starts roiling around, bouncing off the walls, all sense of equilibrium gone and any sense of calm destroyed. Were someone to be located inside that ball, there’d be little in the way of knowing what was up from down and certainly no way to form coherent thoughts. Welcome to your emotional life. This is our reality. The ball could not move without the water being there and neither could we, emotions serve as the impetus for all action and are the guiding force behind all thought (thus destroying the supposed clear distinction between emotions and thinking). When overwhelmed with sheer force the ball has little input as to where it’s going to go or what it’s going to do, it’s just along for the ride and thus so are we when strong reactions occur. Once the turbulence calms down or begins to the ball may find itself under water still for a moment even if there’s nothing more being done and will take a moment to rise to the surface; so it is when we find ourselves in those moments of self-doubt or feeling “underwater” or “over-exposed” after an especially difficult or otherwise emotionally-laden response.

I am not advocating for the abdication of ethics or responsibility here, I’m simply pointing out that just like that little ball in the box we’re not all as stable as we like to think. As the title to this entry pokes at in referencing the scene in Star Wars when Obi-Wan tricks the mentally-deficient troopers into not noticing the very real presence of the droids staring right at them, so with emotions their constant presence and the effect they have on our lives is often difficult to keep aware of. Like with vision we often are only aware of emotions when something changes, giving rise to the idea that they are separate from our thoughts and thus providing an image of will and the self that is hopeless in making sense out of our lives or pointing to a truly legitimate basis for responsibility.

Daniel Siegel imagines human beings to be a triune entity with the brain/body providing the physical manifestation of action and the ground for the transference of the energy and information flow that is instantiated in emotions/thoughts within and through relationships. None of these three (brain/body, energy/information, relationships) are greater than any other, none of them are broken down to any other and none exist without the others presence, joined as they are within the existential reality of our experiential lives in the universe we find ourselves. There is, thankfully, a reciprocity to this existence that is profoundly powerful and utterly beautiful. Not only are we not the disparate clumps of mass we sometimes feel we are, isolated and alone, separated from humanity, but we are neither wholly without tools to use to shape, albeit in small ways, the relational interaction we have as we think of our narratives. Responsibility does not mean ignoring the power of our emotional lives any more than it means self-flagellation every time we bob to the surface and realize what we’ve done isn’t in our so-called best interests. There was an interest reached in every feeling, there was and is a point in every reaction because we are not isolated creatures and reality is a constant relational interaction with everything, fueled and pushed along by the energy/information flow that is often bubbling up from beneath and outside of our awareness until we find ourselves shaken about. Nothing we do, however much we deny it, is without purpose or intent. Responsibility and ethics do not start there but in the recognition of and determination to begin expanding our conscious lives and through concentration/focus begin funneling that energy/information down more healthy tracks.

We do reality and ourselves a disservice for drawing our meaning only from the after-effects of our emotional responses. The reactions themselves are an indelible part of our lives as well and they are the reason, from the small to the huge, for why we do what we do. Embracing the whole of our existence will give us the freedom to cut ourselves some slack and perhaps put some sails on that bobbing ball.

Love Song To Humanity

I am a self-proclaimed news-junkie, spending likely 2-3 hours a day perusing various news outlets and often skimming through many of the comments left behind like so much detritus. The ubiquity of comments and their often contentious air is why I refuse to allow a comment section on my blog, figuring that anybody who wants to can take the time to send a personal email instead. However, news outlets do not have my lack of care concerning providing a simplistic forum to air one’s opinions as if they’ll make any difference in that format. Frankly leaving comments on articles seems to me close to yelling at a TV during a sports event, as if the mere expulsion of emotional content however vehement will translate through the electrical lines and out through the cameras to magically inform the referee “hey, you’re an idiot!” I am reminded of a quote from Mark Twain (?) who said “better to remain silent and be thought a fool then open your mouth and remove all doubt.” The incessant need to, often at length, propound in profundity one’s knee-jerk responses provides ample grounds for noticing the sheer unadulterated gall of the human organism that in the midst of what is almost always vast numbers of unknown variables and the nature of knowledge being at best tentative and when absolute, only in a particular small context, we would declare so strongly our limited and limiting perspectives. Lest anyone think I’m pronouncing judgment upon high, let me be very clear that I have and no doubt will continue to do the same, indeed these little essays being sent off into the blogosphere are likely a case in point though I do find myself offering an internal rationalization that I’m at least attempting to provide a nuanced and largely objective point of view (though of course I would think that of myself).

I’ve hardly started off painting a rosy picture and perhaps should consider changing the title of this entry. Not yet though. While certainly the often vapid and ignorant pontifications being broadcast all over the Internet can be an indication of humanity’s failings, I can with my capacity as a meaning-creating creature choose to look at it another way. People are engaging! Though I am not a parent, it is inconceivable of me to look upon a child struggling to tie their shoelaces for the first time and lament how they’ll never achieve interstellar flight. Or to see the swirls and splotches of the latest painting as it is placed on the fridge and look forlornly upon a child who isn’t’ a Picasso. Or condemn as foolish the attempt by anyone to master an instrument, a mode of thinking or academic study and find it utterly deplorable that they haven’t reached the level of complete lack of error. Seriously, we are children. If the evolution of our species were laid out over the space of day, modern civilization would take up all of about one minute. Just how much are we hoping to have accomplished in that minute? A baby pops out of the mother’s womb and we expect what, the creation of sonnets and explorations of physics? This is not a cop-out, this is an acknowledgment of our fragile and puerile state. The fact that we’ve done so much in that minute should give us pause, not that we still often succumb to our baser impulses and instantiate in our behavior ways of thinking that could be far more healthy. It’s a matter of perspective. Yes we are an opinionated bunch but on the flip-side we haven’t given up screaming to the heavens our existence! In our constant flurry of short lives we do not go willing into that cold dark night, we shout and scream and scamper about with all the glee and fervor of a creature that does not know how to quit.

Before I go further, let me ask you to allow me for a moment to wallow deep into the marrow of my liberal and humanistic roots. There is a Facebook meme going around that notes people have at their disposal in the form of a smartphone the totality of the world’s knowledge at their fingertips and we use it to send pictures of cats in funny poses to people. This is meant to be a sad reflection upon humanity and certainly it is ruefully amusing. But sad? Really? We have at our disposal the ability to destroy so much and yet we send pictures of cute animals. Glorious! The issue here is not the smallness of our passions but that we find passion in the small things. We are beset by constant siren calls from the media and many pulpits that civilization is doomed, that society as we know it is crumbling, that the economy is in various states of near-destruction, wars and rumors of wars, vast conspiracy theories that shrivel up the gonads in paroxysms of fear and yet through it all we laugh and find joy in sending silly photoshopped pictures of frowning cats with ridiculous quotations. 10,000 years ago life was indeed nasty, brutish and short for the vast majority of humanity. Now even the most disenfranchised of us have access to untold riches in comparison. This is not to ignore or downplay the very real social inequalities that exist nor the moral difficulties of perpetuating such disparity, but we should take a moment to take stock of where we have come from. Living a life of plenty is not so much concerned with the quantity of goods at one’s disposal but the intentional quality we impose upon what is in front of us. We may lament and seek to address the deprivations of the starving person but never should we attempt to take away the sheer joy of that same person having a simple meal or a roof over their head for a night.

I am hardly a devotee of Ayn Rand, but she did make a point, among several, that still sticks with me: reason is not an inevitable quality of our existence, it must be trained and learned. The evolution of our frontal lobes is a new thing and they are constantly beset by the rationality offered by the amygdala and hypothalamus, formed as they were amongst tooth and claw. We are but babes held in the arms of a snarling fearful animal. There is so much to learn, so much to grow and we are doing it every day. We may inundate ourselves with fiction but this also means we are reading and expanding. We may get our history far too much from movies but we are still moved by the struggles of yesteryear. There is room here for growth and the mere fact that most of us no longer sell a bride-to-be for cattle means we have come a long way.

Jason Mraz’s song “I Won’t Give Up” is one of my favorites and while it still holds a great deal of emotional resonance at an individual level, there came a point where I started singing along to it as if I was singing to humanity at large. “Just like them old stars I see that you’ve come so far” is indeed a testament to the progress from cave-dwelling superstition to soar as we do amongst the birds of the sky. “I don’t wanna be someone who walks away so easily, I’m here to stay and make the difference that I can make” should be a call that stirs the blood and lights up a desire for a revolution of the soul and the impartation of freedom to all, a freedom of broadening our awareness to ever greater vistas of our potential, looking back to see the blazing trails of stars who have come before us.

“I won’t give up on us, Even if the skies get rough, I’m giving you all my love, I’m still looking up, still looking up.” We need not give up even in the midst of struggle, we need not lose sight of our potential even in the midst of our foolishness and yes indeed we can still with hearts/minds filled with love, look up at what we can still do together.

To Fight Another Day Or Not At All

Argumentation, relationship dialogue, international relations, these and other group behaviors have been and are often described in metaphors of war or fighting. To “stand your ground” and “not give up the high ground” is easily associated with maintaining a stance in the face of “fierce opposition” or against someone who comes in with “guns blazing.” Unloading with “both barrels” is a common euphemism from the midwest in which I grew up and the very foundation of “lining up your facts” has corollaries in trench warfare. War and fighting have long been a fascination of mine, succumbing as I was incapable of not doing so, to the social stereotypes I was surrounded by with males being unequivocally associated with violence and the expenditure of force. Medieval weapons and later eastern warfare, most notably the samurai warrior, became and still are, fascinating subjects to me, however much I may have moved beyond the simplistic identification with the initial gender roles. More than images was the emotional connections and subsequent framing of life as conflict which had a more lasting effect and guided much of my philosophical development. To say that I enjoyed a good argument growing up in my teens and early twenties would be quite the understatement, I lived and breathed for it. The notion of stomping upon my enemies (for what else were they when viewed from a militant frame?) and obliterating their arguments like so much flimsy fortifications was a profound emotional high. Fundamentalist conservative Christianity, with its incessant and ridiculous identification as martyrs facing the overwhelming hordes of secular society, gave fuel to this tendency and righteous indignation towards any who didn’t see the battles which were constantly besetting the man of god. This tendency translated quite easily upon deconverting and finding myself in the land of ideological disenfranchisement (I was quite frustrated at not being able to find the raging secular hordes no matter how much I looked).

To rend and tear, destroy and smash, is to be a child ranting against the existentialist seeming futility of life. I imagine rather well just how much the urgency with which life often seems to be pushing upon us can be transferred and metamorphosed into energy patterns of anger and frustration, when movement is felt to be thwarted by the claims or views of the person “standing in your way” as if “blocking the road of life.” As you can see, the metaphors continue and with them a funneling of the energy of life into a dark and almost entirely pointless flailing of angst-ridden pathos. We each become under these circumstances our own Atlas carrying the weight of the world, straining under the pressure of constantly seeking a new “beachhead” or “conquering another piece of ground.” As an aside, that latter metaphor is amazing in its directing of the gaze upon the human ego, as if the very ground we walk upon is open to being owned or grasped in any way other than as a projection of our own imagination. The ground existed long before we came to be and will be there long after we have gone back from whence we came. But I digress.

Time and maturity, or at least what passes for a close facsimile, has tempered the passions, guiding the energy down narrower paths and learning to pick battles which are truly meaningful rather than just there to be fought. Notice of course that the framing is still going on, warfare is still a part of my worldview. It is not such a bad thing though at times the emotional connections conjoined with this view make life more difficult than it should be, a fact I often smile at ruefully and then continue anyway. Enlightenment, it seems, is less a cognitive acknowledgment than a behavioral shifting or soul-filled identification with. What is known is not always what is acted upon. Another digression but that seems to be the rule for this entry. In any case, as a self-identifying news junkie there is ample examples in today’s world of fiscal policy debates, geo-political movements, social uprisings and rebellions to spend all day pondering the ways and means of positional debate and contemplate the nature of humanity that it creates a world of such constant turmoil. The question put forth is rarely whether to fight or not, but what fight among so many one wishes to join.

Organizing my bookmarks on my browser brought me to the American Atheists website, an organization that supports the social-political needs of atheists and secular americans. In describing their legal philosophy, it was noted that “It should be considered an act of legal negligence for one to take a case to a higher court where it is completely predestined that the court will rule against a meritorious cause, and thereby make bad law not only in that case, in that region of the country, but, depending on which appellate court is chosen, make bad law for a much wider area, where the bad ruling will be the law until the case in question is ultimately, if ever, overruled.” This quote occurs amidst an excellent analysis of jurisprudence and as an answer to the tendency among some to want to fight every single battle, no matter how small or spurious the facts in question, via the courts. This struck me as a rather amazing philosophy to bring to life and so here we are.

Holding a space for principle and values is different than positional living, just as it is in negotiating as William Ury and Roger Fisher note in Getting to Yes. The first is capable of nuance and movement though this does not mean change, the latter is a black and white way of living where one’s idea is isolated only to a singular form and never the two shall be divided. For instance, the difference can be noted between the phrasings “I want to work on how we communicate together” and “It’s my way or the highway.” They both point to a value of communication but the latter is positional and incapable of movement. The other party may dismiss it, go around it or try to smash through it, but there is no sense in which the community aspect of communication is at all acknowledged and thus what could be a wonderful principle for living is reduced to a rock to be bludgeoned upon. There are many moments in life where one must stand in a place of principle and proudly declare their ideas, the civil rights movement and gender rights come to mind. Not every circumstance is answered by fighting, however, instead better handled by simply living. In everything from broad social difficulties to individual relationship frustrations, the question before us is not how we are going to fight but whether to do so at all or leave it until it the consequences of not addressing it are worse than the adverse consequences of doing so. From here we then have an opportunity to relate to life and others in different, often more progressive ways, than looking upon a battlefield never would have afforded us the chance to explore.

The Principle of Communication As Communal-Creation and "Gap-Filling"

At some point in life there comes a time when interests wade into the realm of the romantic and, all aflutter with the maelstrom of neurotransmitters, find a realm of uncertainty as to what someone meant by a comment, what the intent was behind someone’s action and often frustrated by the lack of information due to the absence of good or complete communication. Granted, as some are no doubt now bristling at this impossible standard, there is indeed no way to communicate in such a way as to remove all doubt, all potential for error. I’ve written before about how we exist in others’ minds as internalized projections of our own narratives, reshaped and molded through the lens of the worldview and assumptions of the other person. The same applies to all communications, both bodily and verbal/written. Troll through any bar or social gathering and the sometimes painful reality of this situation is glaringly obvious even through the haze of alcohol and wafting scent of hormones run amok. We simply do not exist the way we think we do for other people. However, before frantic protests of “but he/she knows me!” become shrill, the situation is not nearly so dire as my melodrama is making it sound. Obviously in light of numerous examples from healthy relationships of both friendship and romantic to peace treaties and negotiations of all types there is plenty of room for good and accurate communication, where understanding of one party is at least close enough to what is being by the other to make life manageable. So what is going on?

I’ve previously mentioned a philosophical notion of which practical example I’ve taken to calling “gap-filling.” (Mentioned in entries “Absence of Knowledge Is Not Presence of Truth” and “Filling in the Gaps: Communication Failure in Relationships”) This behavior is shown when an absence of knowledge is identified and current methods of interpreting that absence are not providing the needed substance, leading to the supposition that by necessity another form of knowing must be used. I used this notion to indicate how some, often based on a misunderstanding of science combined with ignorance of the current facts at hand, declare the absence of certainty grounds for declaring their mystical or intuitive truth (most notably Evolutionary Theory, which is not a belief itself but a theoretical system of postulates which are provable and have been repeatedly), I also noted that the practice can be applied to personal relationships as well. In relationships “gap-filling” most often occurs when something has been said but it doesn’t quite match what is assumed to be true and so other knowledge, only tangentially related to the current situation, is identified to fill in the gap between what is said and the assumption. This is done rather than asking questions to clarify, undoubtedly because of concern that in fact the assumption is not true. Examples abound if one takes but a moment to ponder the numerous situations in which a friend comes crying to you hurt over the now known fact of someone’s lack of interest and you ruefully shake your head having known all along. Not to place myself above the fray here because I too have done the same thing, it’s certainly not exclusive to a specific gender. In any case, there is much room still despite the ubiquity of examples showing it can be done to work on making better communication.

I identify with polyamory as a relationship style or way of living. For those who don’t know, polyamory essentially boils down to loving multiple people at the same time. Since this quite basic definition could be used to describe nearly anyone who uses the term “love” to mean more than the romantic type, I will note that where poly differs is the intent of the follow-through. Where most will stick to pre-established societal distinctions, poly will explore love to the fullest extent that a connection can go, regardless of the number of people involved. Number means less than the quality of the connection being pursued and that quality is established based on the connection between the two or more parties involved. To say that this requires epic levels of communication would be an understatement equivalent to whatever immediate example just floated through your consciousness. Now, just as the pursuit of connections within poly takes on a more deliberate conscious intent than in the rest of society, so the same applies to communication. This is where I want to distinguish communication as an act and as a principle, hence the title of this entry.

“Gap-filling” applies to the communicative act, the substantive interchange between two or more people supplying information to one another. As Daniel Siegel notes, relationships are a combination of energy and information flow, a definition that in no small part can apply to consciousness as well with the addition of the individual felt experience. Communication is at core about, as even the root word notes, communion or the interchange of thoughts/emotions. Another way to look at communion is the union of community, where community means any group beyond an individual. Here is where the incredible nature and power of communication is known, where the interchange of information is combined with the flow of energy between two or more people in an existential union. In other words, when you engage in communication with another you are joined in a created world, the making of which is a product of the individual means of interacting with information and the energy patterns associated with the history of experiences and their recall for everyone involved. Thus, communication is not just an act but a principle of living and we engage in it haphazardly at our peril. Yes, yes, I’m being melodramatic again, but I really can’t overstate this point. Communication is not two separate and context-free individual entities lobbing words at each other, it is an interplay of energy and information within the context of a context-full reality. Have you ever looked at a couple and marveled at the way they finish their sentences or simply seem to “get” one another and yet others don’t grasp the exchange? This is why.

Lest people feel vindicated here in declaring to others “you can’t understand,” especially when in the context of others noting the trouble of the connection, I want to add that this knowledge is not incapable of being subject to criticism. We are all of us human and so all knowledge open to one is, albeit in a different level of nuance, knowable to another, but the difference in shading is not enough to make a completely different picture. This is where “gap-filling” comes in again, as it is one among many errors in communication that may indeed feel and is quite real to the person employing the behavior and in fact the knowledge may even be opaque to others for a time, but it is not outside of knowability. Often when someone declares “you just don’t know” it’s out of fear and a deep need to dwell in some delusion concerning themselves or the connection in question (but that’s another topic). Point being, if it is acknowledged as a living practice that communication creates whole new worlds of experience then one should be concerned with just how those worlds are being created and the nature of how they may feel exclusive or separating to others or engender such feelings within the people involved. Here is where the peril is and one of the foundations of the “Us vs. Them” mentality in political and social discourse.

I don’t want to leave on a negative though. Communication or communal-creation is a beautiful and powerful facet of human existence. There is no greater feeling than that engendered by the creation of our worlds when bonding with another, whether the practice be that of simply talking, doing an activity together or engaging in other forms of interaction from nestling on a couch reading to sex. What poly does is attempt to bring this communication principle and place it into constant conscious practice, but whether you identify as poly or not is beside the point. Recognizing the inevitable creation involved in communication will help in any connection of whatever form.

Our Relation to the Spiritual: The Person of God

Yesterday I had the rather fun, at times amusing, and at other times diabolically mischievous opportunity to talk with Mormons who came to my front door. There was a time I was much like them, though not as strident in my door-to-door activities. i reached out to nearly everybody around me loudly and often obnoxiously proclaiming the truth of God as I saw it, utilizing almost verbatim many of the same arguments these fervent adherents used and resting afterwards in a space of reflective responsibility-negating self-righteous condescension concerning the person’s inability to know the truth that I knew. The look on the trainee’s face, so passionate, so filled with the righteous light of his belief, the mask of care at times breaking to have his anger shine through was a tapestry of human emotion and I smiled throughout it all, utterly fascinated by the comments he never intended to make but did anyway because of my refusal to stick to a script. In the end I told them I loved them and challenged them to the same task they put to me, to continue studying and searching to understand more fully the love of god. It felt good to laugh, to share in their fervent emotional stances, to join with them in that bone-deep desire to identify with a transcendent principle and, yes I have to admit, needle them with some potentially consciousness-raising questions and observations, though the humility my ego constantly tells to go away earnestly reminds me that the likelihood of having helped either of them to expand requires greater than I to create. Still, I can safely and reverently declare that in that profoundly human interaction, with souls bared, I saw the person of God.

Hold up. Come again? Yes, I said it. The person of God. I won’t belabor the point by reminding everyone that my usage of the term god in no way implies a supernatural entity. The term has no inherent meaning anymore than there is a single manifestation of any religion, as even a cursory research into denominations and sects will indicate. So what, pray tell, am I talking about? I mentioned in the last entry in discussing the “Meaning of God,” a quote from Ernest Holmes in his book “The Science of Mind,” where he discusses what constitutes a spiritually enlightened person: “He should feel a unity of Spirit in all people, and running through all events. He should declare that the Spirit within him is God, quickening into right action everything he touches, bringing the best out of all his experiences, and forever guiding and sustaining” (p 167). God or Spirit as a universal holding concept, a metaphor demarcating the totality of existence and indicating the interactive and inter-operative nature of all reality, is here shown to be also synonymous with a recognition of belonging within this one substance or ground of being. It is not a thing in itself but a structural apparatus for seeing the world/existence, though of course it has many material components despite being greater than the sum of those parts, in many ways much like love is a structural term to describe or hold together disparate feelings and instances though of course it has gross material components, e.g. the brain/body interactional organism. Those passionate adherents (we’re back to the Mormons) to an ideological form I certainly don’t agree with and of which some components I find reprehensibly heinous, still exist in a universe which inevitably strings together entities into what our minds supply as transcendental experiences. With more research and education I could describe the firing of particular neuronal patterns, the release of neurotransmitters and the utilization of mirror-neurons that helped me feel empathy with the two men standing in front of me and while this certainly would in no way be inaccurate, it would not sufficiently hold the totality of the experience as I felt it, the visceral emotional pull seeing the consternation at being thwarted and the blissful passion of a true believer. This does not require a supernatural explanation, simply an expansion of what is meant by natural/material and a willingness to look at consciousness as an evolving facet of experience.

I may have gotten ahead of myself here, so I’ll slow down and come at this a different way. We’re all or most of us raised on images of deity in western christianity of a kindly old man or, in what is likely one of the silliest examples of euro-centrism, a white-skinned blue-eyed Jesus. That Jesus on appearance alone would likely appear to us as a Muslim or Arab and result in apoplexies for many Americans in the amusingly named “bible belt,” makes me giggle with barely-suppressed rueful glee. Anyway, point being that many of us have a ready-made image provided by mass marketing and available even as an action figure, of what deity is. The narcissistic quality that pervades so much of western religious ideology simply does not hold room for viewing god as anything other than a grander version of the human person and our brains are of little help here, providing interpretations of human faces on anything from toast to potatoes to over-exposures in film. Just as the sweetest sound is our name so the most delectable sight to see and emotionally connect with is a human face. When monkeys were brought back to England, the queen at the time is reported to have declared the whole experience unsettling with how similar they were to humanity. Watching the documentaries of Jane Goodall, one cannot help if they possess even the remotest of imaginative impulses, to see humanity amongst the folds of skin and fur. Certainly there is an evolutionary reason for this, them being distant relatives of us, but the point here is simply to show how much we identify with the human face and have an immediate connection to it. That god retains a human countenance and is often most-easily associated with and discussed as a particular being in similar framings as we would discuss a human person has far more to say about us than about deity. All I’m here attempting to do is get us to step back and rather than see a single face, see all actual and potential faces, rather than seeing a particular, see instead the transcendent principle.

The person of god is inextricably tied to the meaning of god, it is consciousness given form though never merely to one kind. Just as the meaning begins with community and interconnectivity with a hopeful gaze upon continual integration, so the person of god in which identification with that good, whole and complete becomes manifest in every action and creative instantiation which brings about the raising of that reality as remembered present. We are no more limited to one form of god in our minds than we are limited to the number of people we can love and both expand as we put energy into practice. The person of god is not only your brother and sister, mother and father, neighbor and co-worker, but every instantiation of consciousness struggling in the midst of being asleep to the reality of their synonymity with Purpose. We see each one as we walk to work, ride the train or bus, see on the television, each and every connection we make providing another voice to the song of natural ever-expanding exuberant life. We begin with “there but for the grace of god go I,” and finish with “there I AM.”

Our Relation to the Spiritual: The Meaning of God

Divine love seems inexplicably tied to divine judgment at times. With even a cursory search online the subsequent finding of so many articles and images depicting people of otherwise benign feelings supporting hatred and irrational judgment, there is much to be questioned. From Westboro Church to suicide bombers, the only seeming constant in a species devoted to exhibiting the divine in their lives is divisiveness and cruelty. As a former adherent to a particular brand of fundamentalist Christianity, I can with rueful head-shaking recall many a moment of righteous judgment and resultant hurt feelings, even among those I would have called my spiritual brothers and sisters. As I began to fervently question the ideological grounds for my thinking I rarely had to step beyond Christian circles to find criticisms being thrown from one group against another, from one form of apologetic against another. When I then branched out to find that many of the criticisms apologists had against other ideologies were outright inaccurate, almost deliberately so on occasion, I could not help but begin wondering what was the meaning behind this “God” everyone was talking about. When 9/11 hit I am not ashamed to admit that the effect this had on me was the proverbial last straw, though it certainly felt like a large tree. I left it all behind or at least started the journey of doing so, but looking back now I can see I never stopped searching for the meaning of it all.

Those focused on delivering immediate emotion-laden diatribes against religion can declare more people have died in the name of god than through any other means in history. Frankly I’m not sure how this can be quantified and I’m not sure how this makes a point beyond directing attention to the human predilection of rationalizing behavior. Without providing a particular definition of the term “god” the observation is meaningless beyond a recognition that people will fill a term with all manner of subjective intent. A better statement would be that more people die from those justifying their actions through identification with a transcendent idea than any other, but there just doesn’t seem to be that strong a ring to this and since ideologies typically associated with liberalism can then be lumped into this observation, I don’t imagine there are many who would be quick to use it. However, as a statement concerning human behavior it provides a far greater point of contact for analysis and the potential of behavioral change.

A feeling of the transcendent is quite likely an inevitable by-product of how our brains organize experience and for that matter create the delusion of a self. Putting together the vast disparate information provided by the existence of which we are a part of and apart from, the brain creates a seamless reality often even if it needs to make things up. Our sight for instance is not nearly as comprehensive as we like to think, focused primarily on identifying movement (no doubt from our evolutionary predator-prey history) and funneled through only a small section of the overall eye. The image that we “see” is largely a creation of the mind, built from the constant movements of the eye taking in data and then left there until something is noticed to have changed and even that is controlled in no small part through conscious awareness. Anyone who has been startled by finally noticing someone who’s been standing right beside them for a length of time is well aware that consciousness is not all-encompassing. That our brains can include things that aren’t or weren’t in experience is the stuff of memory research, most notably Elizabeth Loftus, where people have been known to utterly ignore a person in a monkey-suit or add false details to someone observed during a particularly charged emotional experience. All of this and more lends itself to the observation that the provision of a transcendent narrative is foundational to human experience, indeed could almost be synonymous with it. From here it is not a stretch to note that just as in memory recall where a person can deliberately place themselves as a participant or as outside observer, the feeling of a transcendent ideology can be thrust out beyond a single person and encompass more, or at least contain the feeling of having more.

This ability to create transcendent intent is not in itself an evil thing. Everything from skyscrapers to iPads, social organizations to NGOs helping out the poor and hungry, is a creation out of transcendent intent, the form that was once only considered in consciousness. I am reminded of people who lament how cell-phones have created distance within families but then note how during hurricane Katrina the Red Cross raised millions from small donations through texts on phones. Every form once manifest, while still retaining the qualities of which it was made, now creates a space for the impartation of anyone’s intent, however different it may have been from the original. This is as Ken Wilber points out, part of the nesting reality of interlocking systems, where everything in consciousness or in spirit has a corollary that while not reducible to the other is neither bound solely within it. In other words, while particular manifestations of the god idea can be used to justify any manner of behaviors, it should not be ignored that the ideas stem from a universal ability within humanity, that of determining transcendental purpose. By focusing on this underlying aspect of experience we can then move forward with the creation of a god concept that is both humanizing and uplifting, exhibiting the best of what we are and wish to be, community-building rather than further separating us (the particulars of this will be dealt with within the next two entries).

There is from Ernest Holmes a recognition of this reality in his contemplation of conscious spirit when he declares: “He should feel a unity of Spirit in all people, and running through all events. He should declare that the Spirit within him is God, quickening into right action everything he touches, bringing the best out of all his experiences, and forever guiding and sustaining” (The Science of Mind, p 167). Meaning is debatable, the creation of it is not. Once we begin from a place of connection, there is no space for separation, but if we begin in separation that is all we will find.

Wheels Within Wheels

There are only so many variables that any single person can keep track of. Research continually indicates that multi-tasking is not nearly as efficient as we like to fool ourselves into believing, though there are better and worse ways of doing it. I marvel at chess-masters who can hold dozens of future moves in their heads but while I in no way wish to lessen this achievement, the moves are prescribed and cover only one type of game. Were they to hold that many moves for multiple types of games, well, that’d be closer to real life. And that’s precisely what we’re all faced with every day, keeping in awareness vast systems of information to be utilized every waking moment of our lives. To make it even more complicated, there are systems and systems and then further systems within those. There was a time when “Renaissance Man” meant someone who truly understand several disciplines, now it’s more along the lines of someone who has a thimble-sized grasp of even a couple and certainly not a comprehensive understanding. The world is just so freaking big, to be a specialist is to understand an increasingly smaller facet of a discipline even as it continues to expand. The Library of Congress contains 34.5 million books and written materials held in bookshelves spanning 838 miles, adding 10,000 pieces of material every day and these are not even every book to have been written. The world is an expanding sphere of ever-increasing awareness in our understanding, no matter the subject that is embarked upon and the scope of our awareness is made infinitesimal by the breadth that is held in the unconscious or pre-conscious. This is no more made apparent than in relationships.

A recent blog article on how relationships are often thought of as an escalator, with a standard path of an upward trend moving towards ever-increasing levels of intimacy on a single track with a particular end in mind. It’s an incredibly powerful memeplex with a strong metaphorical structure that undergirds so many of our societal behaviors within relationships. Ever been asked or asked yourself how your relationship “got off track?” or “went off the rails?” Ever wondered why there aren’t coupons and vacation packages for single people or endured the scorn of being single into old-age (designated as anything over 25 depending on place in country)? If you’re in an alternative relationship, why is it even called “alternative” as if there are legitimate and illegitimate types of connections? If you’re in a relationship have you ever become obsessed over where it’s going, looked at vacations or presents or meeting the family as indications of a new level of intimacy rather than just a part of the life being built? Ever looked at your partner and wondered if they’re on the same journey with you, without wondering at why parallel wouldn’t work just as well? I could go on and on and perhaps have already gone too far, but the end result here is an indication of just how much mental context runs our lives. Social variables and the genetic predispositions and temperaments that make us individuals are all wheels within wheels, cosmic machinations at a certain level playing out often without our full understanding or even our awareness.

I’ve spoken before about the egoistic hubris with which we tell our stories, ignoring the hundreds if not thousands of variables that occurred without any connection to us and which also touched hundreds if not thousands of other people to create that particular circumstance of which we are so enamored because it “happened to me!” “The point is that my thoughts themselves arise in a cultural background that gives texture and meaning and context to my individual thoughts, and indeed, I would not even be able to “talk to myself” if I did not exist in a community of individuals who also talk to me” (Wilber, Ken (2011-08-18). The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad (Kindle Locations 533-535). Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition). The desire to tell these stories and find acknowledgment in them becomes so intense that we’ll become incensed and emotionally distraught if people aren’t paying enough attention, especially if that someone is our partner. I don’t wish to deny here the need to pay attention to people’s stories, I for one absolutely love hearing not only what stories people decide to share but the how of the telling. What I wish to focus on here is for us to step back a moment and get a picture of just how grand the context of our lives truly is, then for a moment place that understanding on the people in our lives.

Relationships do not exist in a vacuum, there are as noted here already, bound within wheels within wheels, countless variables and contexts both aware of and not aware of that effect the flow of our lives and create both the space for and the impetus behind our actions. Whether we subscribe to the escalator metaphor or not, simply because of the society in which we live we will be effected by it. Having already quoted from Wilber, he goes on to say “my individual thoughts only exist against a vast background of cultural practices and languages and meanings and contexts, without which I could form virtually no individual thoughts at all” and later “culture itself is not simply disembodied, hanging in idealistic midair. It has material components, much as my own individual thoughts have material brain components. All cultural events have social correlates.” The person in front of you, whether it be a romantic partner, a friend, an acquaintance, a co-worker or just some random person on a bus or train, exists within interlocking nests (I’ve used the term “baskets” before but since I’m quoting Wilber I’ll use his term) of being and simply because you’re relating to them means you too are bound up, however differently due to your own context(s), in their systems as well. When we interact we are doing so within this giant swirling chaos to varying degrees of understanding. The person and/or you yourself may not grasp just why some of the behavior occurs or even if you get it, the other person may not and vice versa. While anger and frustration, hurt feelings and distress may be inevitable the time period of which they disrupt can be mitigated.

“Take nothing personally” is one of the 4 Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and while it can be used as a means of abdicating responsibility for one’s actions effecting another (trust me I’ve run into plenty of people who do this) I want to note that it is far more about identification. Connected with my thoughts on forgiveness, identification here is what happens when a single notion, supplied by society or another person, becomes the primary controlling narrative of our lives. It’s what happens when we get upset and hurt by another, we take on what exists only in their context and because we are joined with them we take it on as our own. This is inevitable but not necessary to do, especially not long-term. By taking stock of and becoming ever-more aware of the ideas, metaphors, memes, mores, that make up the context(s) of our lives, we can step back quicker from the hurt feelings we have and in addition hold a space for the people in front of us of a greater understanding and compassion.

Blind Sight: We Only See What We Want To

Tomorrow I'm going to die. I could be hit by a car or knocked in front of the train or get into an auto accident. Any number of biological issues of which I am currently unaware could strike and lay me out. Falling debris from space could in a fluke of chance strike me or any number of potential people with borderline homicidal rages could see me as a target. The list of potential deaths is as long as my imagination can churn in the land of the macabre.



I am not going to die tomorrow. At least, not likely. I don't know. Neither do you. No amount of planning or training can hope to possibly address every conceivable possibility and even then there remains those events of which we cannot conceive but remain possible. The sheer magnitude of the potential frailty of my life is enough to short-circuit my frontal lobe and send me spiralling into a morass of despair and nerve-stopping terror.



However, I don't have to sit there contemplating such things. I can, just as so many of us do moment to moment, day to day, year after year, think of other things and live a life of varying importance. The enormity of our frailty is eclipsed, wonderfully, by the even greater degree of life that flows in, as and between every nuanced instantiation of nature's laboratory. I have stood in the midst of masses of people at airports and concerts and had the humbling though exhilarating notion occur that I will likely never see a single one of these people again no matter how well traveled I could become and each day they are replaced by untold others going about their lives blindingly oblivious to the seething potential they brush across at every intersection of narratives.



Watching "Stranger Than Fiction" again last night, I was struck again by the author's poignant question that if a man truly sees their death coming and goes out to meet it anyway, is that not a man you'd want to have stay alive? It is the quintessential existential question, one that much of technological and entertainment-based society is contrived to help us never ponder.



The notion of death is a fear-laden cognitive device, one that is for many halts us in our mental steps at its shocking finality. And yet, we are faced with it every day, it rests underneath every future plan, personal quest, building project and started journey. If only we plan and keep planning ahead death will never reach us, and yet it does every day, as inexorable as any other physical force. For every device thrown up in its path another one from before plummets in futility. We look forever forward afraid that if we look back we will be caught.



We are already caught, already held. We do not ignore death's door by opening up others in the same hallway, that one will always be there, never forgotten however much we attempt to ignore it. There has been much said, primarily in religious philosophical circles, that without death there would be no morality, it serves as a stop-gap for ethical peril. Others posit that it serves as the primary force behind the scurrying lives we all live. Both undoubtedly have some truth, but it is a truth contingent upon accepting death from the assumed perspective each position takes. Death does not have to be punishment any more than it has to be a separate and distinct force. In every change of life there is a death of a sorts, from one form shifting to another. Even in our own lives we are not the people we were a year ago, five years ago, yesterday, believing we are simply a by-product of a biological narrative stringing together separate events into a whole. The impetus behind our actions, once divorced from death, can be bound within life itself, death as merely one facet of life, not the cessation of it.



Certainly this thinking is not easy to hold onto. I for one still shudder at times thinking of the cold nothingness that awaits, my imagination providing sensations that rationally I know would be impossible without a body and yet still struck by the power of the image. However, like the character in "Stranger..." I attempt on occasion to look in the face of my inevitable end and, despite its inevitability, strive forward anyway. The result is not that I become precisely a man worthy to continue living, but that I find a life worthy of calling such.



Frank Herbert in "Dune" through his character Paul declares "If I am to die, I must pass along a transcendental lesson.  I must leave with serenity." I can only hope to embody this lesson, though if not achieved completely, the reaching for it creates a life embracing both what comes before and what lies ahead. In this day on the Eve of a new year, holding both seems quite an important thing to do.

Resolution as Sacrifice

The New Year is upon us and with it comes the inevitable round of created and broken resolutions, the annual practice having become more parody than source of progress. Before the fires of change reach fever pitch and that new gym membership languishes in auto-pay purgatory, there's some room to think for a moment about the movement from old to new, from habit to hope. As I recently finished Neil Gaiman's "American Gods," the story provides ample imaginative space to explore this query.


Shadow, the central character, gets caught up in the machinations of the god Odin who desires to wage a war of the old gods against the new. The old have lost a great deal of power, brought over here to the United States in the minds of those having come from their native lands, time having distanced ancestors from their roots and the old gods no longer being sacrificed to or believed in. Instead, new gods have arisen from the intent of a modern America, gods of television and prostitution, highways and cell-phones. These new deities are belligerent and puerile, flitting about in their desires, always attempting to stay one step ahead of the next fashion to grip the social consciousness. Odin is tired of languishing in a pit of mediocre life and takes Shadow on a trip across the States to inspire other older gods to rise up. Along the way there is painted a picture of society in which the sanctified areas, places of worship, where once were monuments to human ingenuity, instead have been replaced by carnivals and rest-stop amusements; Stonehenge replaced by the worlds largest ball of twine. Continuity has been replaced by frivolity, depth of feeling replaced by blips of commercial focus. While both sets of gods can be malicious and care little about the consciousness of their hosts except as it gives their existence legitimacy, there is a quality to the old gods that often strikes a chord in Shadow, however much he despises the whole enterprise he's caught up in.



This quality is best noted in sacrifice, which plays a large role in "American Gods." While the new gods demand sacrifice, there is a passiveness to it which would be sad were it not so pathetic. People's lives are given up in homage to a deity they know little about which offers them nothing more than momentary release from a world so much broader than the leftover dregs they curl up around. One is reminded of the sludge left behind from coffee having sat for too long in a pot, a dark slow-moving mass that makes you ponder how you could have ever put that inside you but still entices you to flush it out and make more. The old gods demanded so much more, they demanded full lives, not just entire lives but full ones, those dedicated to the service of transcendent ideals, filled with purpose. Shadow offers himself up to bear witness upon a tree to a god's passing and in so doing changes the course of many events, finding as well in himself truths that had long been hidden. Juxtaposed with this is the story of a man swallowed by a god of debauchery who's last breath is like a whimpering gasp. Simply put, there is no comparison.



So what is all this to do with New Years and resolutions? I've had brought to my attention that this year has been in large part about consequences, the effects of choices made in the past which, not often labelled good or bad, still end up needing to be dealt with. Beowulf's dragon resonates here, the consequences of actions coming full circle at the end of a cycle in life. In defeating the dragon there is found a fulfilled purpose, a sacrifice of a purpose-full life in the service of something greater. With this in mind resolutions can be noted. As mentioned, this annual rite has become more parody than purpose-filled, much in the way our gods have become more ephemeral. In determining a resolution it may best be kept in mind that true sacrifice has less to do with calories and more to do with inner meaning, less to do with hopping on a treadmill and more to do with the intent with which one connects with every person they come across. The New Year can be a time of determining which gods are being created by our intent, which deities we pay homage to and in so doing, direct or redirect the course of our lives.