Pegged, Pigeion holed, and Lost

功夫

• I've seen his type
• I've seen that kind coming and going
• I've got her number
• You know the type
• I can spot them a mile away
• Deffinately not my kind of people 

...And on and on... We are all guilty of making snap judgments about people. We BLINK and then we know, and although our instincts may indeed be right sometimes, the best way to develop positive and valuable relationships is to step back, and look at people in a broader and deeper context. As you get good at this you will find that it doesn't take that much time or require too much effort to get a clearer picture of who you are involved with.

Our mental map of reality is influenced by many things. It's hard to make sense of all the elements that make up our experience even if we stop and think about everything carefully. When we put people in a box, judge or discard them, are we really getting what we want out of the encourter?

It's certainly a very important, evolved aspect of our behavior to be careful when we encounter strangers. Way back when we would have to size up outsiders quickly to ensure our survival, if we didn't our enemies might be in our tents and off with our goods and families before we could say "hello".

We tend to compare people with what is familiar to us, with what we are comfortable with, with what is fashionable within our social group and with past experience. Although this is useful and natural, this way of evaluating people doesn't always give us an accurate picture of who we are thinking or talking about.

Sizing up people, no doubt, has utility. If I were on a bus and saw a predator boarding, I would be careful, stay watchful and possibly even get off at the next stop. I also wouldn't want to be ostracized by my friends and colleagues because of my associations with "undesirable" kinds of people. We all are wary of people we perceive as threats, and we all go along with the crowd to a certain extent. We have to be aware however, that if we go too far in this direction we are likely to get stuck in habits of judging others that can work against us and keep us from connecting with valuable people.

For many of us getting stuck in negative patters of judging others comes from negative past experiences with people. Sometimes we take these experiences and create generalizations that extend these to people that had nothing to do with what bothers us or hurt us. In doing so we get bogged down in habit of thought that produce more fear in us.  Fear is a good thing, but too much fear can paralyze us and keep us from experiences that could be extremely positive. As always, finding balance, being centered, and avoiding extremes that can become pathological, is a good way to progress through life. Too much fear can make you sick, no fear can kill you.

Many times when we hear people putting someone they don't even know down they are doing so because of fear: fear of not being accepted; fear of something they don't understand; fear of growing; fear of change, etc.

Now, allow me to type for a bit. I want to quote a somewhat lengthy passage in Steven Pinker's book, "The Stuff of Thought".

"Our sense of causality, Hume noted, is "the cement of the universe". As we make it through the day we constantly tap our causal intuitions to understand what is going on in the world and how we should deal with it (the windows are wet, so it must have rained; if I wear a raincoat, my clothes will stay dry). When these intuitions fail, we know we are dreaming, or have projected ourselves in Wonderland or some other product of the imagination. We look to science as a purer and tougher version of our search for causes -- as the best way to identify what caused an earthquake, or the arrangement of the solar system, or the appearance of the human species itself.

It's disconcerting, then, to learn that on close inspection this cement is as shoddy as the stuff used in Boston tunnels. The more you scrutinize causality, the less sense it makes, and some philosophers have suggested that science should just kiss it goodbye. At the same time, causality is deeply entrenched in our language and thought, including our moral sense, and no account of the human predicament can avoid pondering how our causal intuitions are related to the causal texture of the universe. It's no accident that the starting point for our modern understanding of causation was a book by Hume called Treatise of Human Nature.

Hume... and Kant... worried about how we could justify our inference about unobserved events -- whether we could ever elevate a deduction like "if you drop something, it will fall.....to the level of certainty we are accustomed to in logical and mathematical deductions like "If a triangle has two equal sides, then it has two equal angles; this triangle has two equal sides, therefore it has two equal angles." He concluded that we can't, though of course we are not being unreasonable when we expect the glass to fall. Our causal intuitions are a handy part of our psychology, even if they fall short of granting us certitude. The dubiety springs from the sad fact that our causal intuitions, deep down, are no more than expectations stamped in by experience, and these expectations are satisfied only if the universe is lawful, a brute assumption we can never prove. ...Hume explaining why we think a billiard ball causes a second one to move:

...It would have been necessary, therefore, for Adam...to have had experience of the effect which followed upon the impulse of these two balls. He must have seen, in several instances, that when the one ball struck upon the other, the second always acquired motion. If he had seen a sufficient number of instances of this kind, whenever he saw the one ball moving towards the other, he would always conclude without hesitation that the second would acquire motion. His understanding would anticipate his sight and form a conclusion suitable to his past experience. It follows, then, that all reasonings concerning  cause and effect are founded on experience, and that all reasonings from experience are founded on the supposition that the course of nature will continue uniformly the same.

Tucked into this analysis of whether we can justify our causal attributions is an offhand theory of the psychology of causality called constant conjunction: that our intuitions of cause and effect are nothing but an expectation that if one thing followed another many times in the past, it will continue to do so in the future.... People understand (even if they don't always apply) the principle that correlation does not imply causation. The rooster's cock-a-doodle-doo does not cause the sun to rise... These are perceived to be epiphenomena: by-products of the real causes.

Whew! That was a marathon quote from Professor Pinker. I hope he won't mind and I hope my typing skills are improving.

In a not too indirect way this passage pertains to what I want to say about how we deal with our expectations of people we encounter in our lives.

Have you ever heard anything like this:

"I met a few Americans on my travels in Asia and they were all loud idiots who didn't seem to know anything about what's going on in the world. Americans are stupid. I don't like George Bush, he's stupid, and he's an American, therefore all Americans are stupid...."

For those of you who are interested in logical fallacies, it's time to: name the fallacies. It's obvious that the reasoning above is faulty, narrow and shallow, and yet how many times have we heard just such things effortlessly coming out of the mouth of people around us. 

I don't really think anyone is "stupid" but some of us are "dumb"; dumb in the sense that we are incapable of hearing, or listening to anything that we don't like or is unfamiliar or that we think is difficult. We remain deaf to things outside of our comfort zone, and stuck to our own limited preconceptions. 

Or how about:

"My boy friend lied to me, therefore, he is a liar incapable of being honest or telling the truth!" "My ex girl friend hurt me badly so now I am a massaganistic bastard bent on revenge against all women."

That reminds of of an Earnest Hemingway quote: "The best way to protect yourself from a woman is to have too many of them."

Yes, these examples sound extreme but I am afraid that as I type this now similar things are being said across the globe in a frequency that would make any of us blush.

Martial arts experts, who have been police or soldiers (warriors), would know that  following your intuition about a person or situation could save your life. They would also have the social, psychological, and analytical skills available to follow through with a reasonable and hopefully non-violent attempt to discover if there is a real threat or just a perceived threat, and could resolve the situation in a positive way. I am convinced that the vast majority of professional security, police and military personnel are committed professionals who truly want to serve and protect. I also believe that if the threat were real these professionals could handle a real threat quickly and efficiently. Violence is a necessary tool in our world; would it were not so...

Snap judgments without following through with considerate analysis of the broader context, the bigger picture, without an attempt to understand the person in a deeper way, will, in many cases, fall well short of  helping  us to discover anything meaningful about the person we are thinking about and reacting to. Snap judgments call also lead to all manor of hurt. Pain that could easily be avoided with a little bit of thoughtfulness.

The need to evaluate people, circumstances and situations come at us quickly, everyday, all the time. It is important to hone our thinking stills in a way that will bolster our intuition and allow us to find value in situations and in people that we might normally just write off or avoid.

This is a process of course, and the more involved we become with a person the more we invest ourselves in the experience we are having with them, the more risk we might have to manage, but if we are prepared for the consequences of taking the risk, we can manage our expectations, and turn a potentially negative situation into a positive one.

This is what I call, MIND KUNG FU. I could also call it MIND AIKI JITSU. The idea is that if you have a deeper understanding of a person, you can often turn a potentially negative encounter  into something positive simply by turning things around, looking at different angles of what is going on, and making something positive out of the reality in the situation. One can turn mindless, negative gossip into a discussion of how we might be able to help someone. One could turn a normally shallow conversation about stereotypes into a discussion of the richness of culture. One could recall a negative past experience in the light of lessons learned that changed your life for the better.

The trick is not to fall into assumptions that lead you nowhere but to despair. Turn your  intuition  into a creative  starting point for exploring  the truth about  someone from  multiple  points of view. If you show genuine interest in another person, and truly listen to them, you might find that there is a lot there that you can work with, enjoy and learn from.

I would like to explore the idea of Mind Kung Fu in the future. Whatever strategy or tactics we might move to action, it all starts with a thought. We have to learn when to react like lightning and when to hold back and explore the broader context. Both are important. If we want to get the best from our encounters with people we need first to care about knowing them. Value in relationships flows from the adventure of learning about people through shared experiences in the context of everyday life.

We should not put our judgment in a box, rather, we should let it out into the world to continue to explore reality from multiple points of view. People are complex and deserve respect. If we find that our negative first impression was correct we can deal with it appropriately. But what a waste, to loose a gem of a human being, to the bandwagon of snap judgment.

A note to the spiritually hungry.

A friend mine sent me this note:

"i have just recently competed my course, Via De Christo, at a local church where we men had a "retreat" for 3 nites and 4 days. This was a profound experience for me as its so rare to be around both the spiritually hungry ( the men taking the course ) and the spiritually filled ( the priests and pastors who led the course and counciled us as brothers ). the mixture was one of honesty, of sharing, of...a fire has been rekindled in my heart and i feel humbled and yet totally re connected with God. i am not feeling as if I am "searching" but rather feeling "a connected knowing" and able to sense God's presence. its cool. nothing has changed, but everything has too. i'm still me, but seeing things in a different light."

Here was my response:


It sounds like you had a wonderful experience with a great group of people. I would have liked to have been there. I am still agnostic about such feelings, and definitions. I don't find it necessary to express my experience as a connectedness with God. However, I am open to my own experiences and to the amazing process of interpreting them. I endeavorer to gain as much as I can from everything I delve into. I know that whatever I experience is just a tiny pinch of what's out there, in reality. The supernatural is not my realm, and so I am not concerned with it. I like to suspend my disbelief for entertainment and to let my imagination fly to discover things that I might usually overlook. I'm less concerned about what I know than about what I don't know; about the books I have read or the books on the shelf than the books I will never come to know exist or could exist (Teleb); I am less interested in our current body of knowledge than in the potential that 6 billion brains on the planet have, and whether or not we will come to use a fraction more per capita of this Global resource in our life times. 

Faith is a circle. I believe therefore I believe. I believe what I have experienced therefore my faith is the right faith. Everything you need to know about the good new is in the Bible (New and Old Testament).We can imagine we choose to believe or we can say that a supernatural force inspires us to believe, the source of which comes from wherever you agree to think it comes from. What I am feeling is a closeness to my own experience of what I know as "Christ". What an acquaintance of mine calls, "being in integrity with Christ". I don't even know what that means really. I am not so sure that Christ was really such a great guy. I know the authors of the bible are highly vested in the Messiah myth. They want to provide people with, "the way".

My pastor says there is no middle ground. (Yes, I attend a Christian fellowship church.) Either Jesus is the savior or Jesus was a nut case liar: you can't have it both ways. You believe or you don't. That is perfectly logical. The problem problem arises when they try to find some semi scientific way to prove that the bible was divinely inspired. If you know anything about biblical criticism, history, logic and science you truly must know that the so called proofs of the Christian apologists are worn out and impotent. 

I can understand why people four thousand years ago wanted to be saved. Life was pretty uncertain back then. It was a violent and volatile world with lots of antagonism between tribes, cities, and so on... If you preached that there was a powerful benevolent and divine force out there coming to fix everything it would sound pretty compelling. 

If I am going to live "in integrity with Christ", what kind of Christ am I talking about? My Christ will deliver me from ignorance, and help me understand things in this world better. The journey will have been interesting and filled with vitality and love until death separates me from any need.

Both the new and old testament, when I read them now, make me feel like I am chewing cardboard. Most biblical apologists bore me to tears. The "Good News" preached by most preachers makes me worry about the future of the evolution of human intellect. And yet, I still enjoy reading the bible and learning about how it became what it is. I find it fascinating and inspiring. I find inspiration all over the place. In our time it's hard to avoid all the brilliant minds out there. If you have the slightest desire to connect with brilliance it's just a mouse click away.

My personal gnostic experience (in the Greek sense of the word) is what I feel and contemplate. Those prayers and meditations that I can feel are changing the structure of my psycho/physical being and my "spirit": spirit as a metaphor for those mysterious things about me that I can't define, dissect or figure out. The spirit that seems to animate the organism I call "Steven" that is part and parcel of nature. I am not a dualist but it's hard to avoid a feeling of dualism. I feel comfortable with metaphors, images and imagination, and also comfortable with scientific methodologies and the pursuit of knowledge about Nature.

To cut through the contradictions of the Old and New Testaments and get to the spirit of "Christ" via one's own meditation practice, you first need to look at the story and understand where it comes from, how it truly came about, and it's true significance. I feel that scholarly pursuits, general learning, personal growth paths, science and technology all contribute to this process. In fact without the innate curiosity that encourages such pursuits one's experience would be, in the end, not of much practical or "spiritual" value. 

I am not a Jew living 2200 years ago, yearning for a savior, I am a 21st century, literate, moderately intelligent fellow trying to understand who I am, what I'm doing here, where I'm going, and how to live and work with others towards positive, healthy outcomes. I find it easier to identify and be inspired by my relative contemporaries. There is a long list of people who inspire me from ancient times to the present day. I am not talking about cultural relativism. I am talking about being thankful for what I learned from my encounter with these people.

The world is real after all, and so are we. Our spiritual feelings are real too. The question is from what domain do these feelings come from? There are those who are comfortable with the idea that spiritual experiences spring only from the supernatural and those "mystics" who are comfortable feeling that the great spring of life is nature itself and learning about nature is its own reward.

As Albert Camus might ponder: "Can I live a life full of meaning without the supernatural?" I certainly can. Can I be moral without the supernatural? Yes I can. That might be the thing that differentiates a lot of agnostics from their more Faithful brothers and sisters. That and not needing to believe that one has to have access to ultimate truth. I think we also find our "heaven" in moments throughout life. 

Perhaps we don't need to be saved. Things are much better now then they where then I can imagine. Maybe it's about progressing incrementally towards an even slightly better tomorrow. To do that we have to police ourselves. It seems that many times we don't do a very good job of that. I suppose if God wanted to make it all right he would have the power to do it. If you believe that the bible will be the one road map that shows the way then I think we will be a long, long way away from heaven for a long, long time. And if history tells us anything, bible or not bible, things can go to hell in a hand basket in a heart beat. It's best to be vigilant.

I hope we have some semblance of an idea of our limitations. But being fallible doesn't mean that the answer to being better people is only one thing: Jesus Christ. 

So there you have it. Was Jesus, the WORD made flesh sent here to show us the way? I just don't feel it. That doesn't mean that I am not open to the possibility, but I find it extremely unlikely. So one more time this sentiment is shared. I wish I had a dollar....i'd be rich.

Love evolves like everything else. Teleological arguments of where it all begins and what started it all are useless. There is no proof that Jesus was the son of God accept the proof that comes from belief. The moment when one experiences time dilation, when one becomes the loving, one is already there. Being there is my goal. Like Chauncey the Gardener, but with a brain that is alive, well and in pursuit of everything. 

My P.O.V. is a "light on my feet", I would like to think, and I am following the light. In the darkness there may be only light. Who knows? Nothing has changed, but everything has to..."

What do I want and why do I want it? Or, what makes me want what I think I want?

"For secularists, the most urgent need is for a coherent popular philosophy that answers vital questions about how to live one's life."

Ronald Aronson, "Faith No More"

Are we free to choose the splintering pathways that make us become what we become? Is our process of becoming our own? Or, is it shared, integrated with all processes of becoming? Our desires are determinants of our behavior and a multitude of influences determine our desires. We are all part and parcel of a vast, random stream of things happening. Events, events and more evens, structured and framed by imagination and knowledge, by nature and physics, by language and dark matter; if it exists. It all depends on what it is.

I say often that we are all, to a certain extent, slaves to fashion. What I mean by this is that we don’t always know how we got where we are, what motivated us, and why we have come to feel that we need or want certain things or conditions in our life. Many of us suffer under the illusion that we are in absolute control of our lives. We tend to think that our choices come from our Soul, our Self, OUR OWN Mind. Somehow it just makes perfect sense that we should want a specific kind of car, or job, or spouse. And many of us believe that we are both heavily influenced by outside forces, and at the same time, sorting things out for ourselves in some semi enlightened way. And some of us move confidently through the arch of our lives knowing that our choices created who we are and what kind of lives we have lived. And then again, many of us feel like we are absolutely out of control, unlucky, and out of sync with our world: never really feeling in harmony with our circumstances. We have never achieved or gotten what we think we wanted. At this end of the spectrum it seems that we are chasing, constantly pursuing something that we can never reach and our frustration knows no bounds. It’s odd to think that social and personal pathologies spring from both extremes. As the Zen Master might say: “All is illusion”. Or, maybe a Gnostic in 100 AD: in the beginning was the word, and the word was illusion.

If there is no ego to transcend then what is transcended? A sense of self can be a mind trick, necessary to get along in life with people struggling to find their way in a confusing and rapidly changing world or in a situation where one has no power to make the rules. Our identity can flower into something natural and pleasurable leading to fulfillment or we can stumble, alone in confusion. Dualism can give us a sense that there is something pure about us that guides the way, in collaboration with mysterious forces that somehow know what is good for us. We can be alone with our delusions and illusions, or we can share them with large groups, multiplying the sense that we are somehow right where we need to be and headed in some inexorable direction.

It seems to me that there are various levels or degrees of how we may examine ourselves, our world and our experiences. On the simplest level we just go along for the ride, fall into the river of life and let its force do with us what it will. Some may be washed up on the shore of paradise, while others will be ripped apart by obstacles. People like this are unable, incapable, or ill-equipped to navigate the river. From this image we can imagine how hard it is to fathom what forces determine our experience. Whatever happens happens. It’s ultimately fate that decides, or God’s will, or some other magical force of nature, or the Universe. With this degree of awareness, and knowledge it’s hard to imagine the desire to seek, like Voltaire’s Candide, “the best of all possible worlds”, and even harder to imagine the stories assault on philosophical optimism. And yes, utopianism is the road to genocide. I do believe, however, that in each of us, even as we leave our childhoods behind, there is an element of the idealist, the dreamer, who holds out hope for something better. And in each of us there is an element of dogged, stoicism in the face of our fate. Some of us know only pain in this life and grow used to it, while some of us are teased and tormented by knowing both pain and pleasure. Life is a continuum and what will be, by virtue of having been. Here I often say: “It is what it is, was what it was, and shall be what it shall be, by virtue of having been. Something we may intuit but not articulate in such a fashion. At this level we can only escape our ephemeral reality when we die.

A dashing, thoughtful man with death hanging out of his mouth and a car the instrument of his death.

Another level of consciousness of our life experience brings us to some classic existential questions. Albert Camus’s postulate in, The Myth of Sisyphus, “There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide”, reduces life down to its essential value judgment, is it worth it? Imagine what kind of examination of one’s life and the world one would have to muster to contemplate such things, and to articulate such things in such a way: terse, passionate, and final. We push the bolder up the hill and watch it roll down again: futility. Do we really need magic, God, Gods, mythology, Meaning, symbols, rituals and so on? Apparently, when you look deeply into questions like these the answer, for most people, is a resounding yes. In the future who knows if the utility of the supernatural will remain? But for now, many people can’t imagine a world without God. I have often found the occasion to utter this phrase from Malcolm Lowry’s, Under The Volcano: “No se puede vivir sin amar” (it is not possible to live without loving; or what I think he wrote in the book, but comes out differently in translation; there is no reason to live without love). Allow me just one more “Under The Volcano” quote from one more crutch: “How, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old Indian woman playing dominoes with a chicken?) We all have things that we think we can’t live without. Many of us never know if we can make it without the things that we feel we most depend on, because we will not have digested the dynamics of dependence. A believer believes, a sinner sins, a drinker drinks, and a lover loves. We do what comes naturally, and we do what the unique context of our lives has trained us to do. Somehow we feel predestined, or somehow we feel at the mercy of chaos.

What is this force that destines us? (The Stuff of Thought) What thing pushes us on and determines what we become, how we behave, what we want, and where we wind up when we meet our death? What forces of nature and nurture develop our mind, being, body, thoughts, choices and outlook? Did our SELF exist before we were embodied in this time and place and will that SELF continue on after we drop this body? Now we have to climb to a higher level and dig deeper into our consciousness to examination what is truly not for the intellectually, or might I add, spiritually lazy. This kind of inquiry requires the kind of effort that one has to acquire an acquired taste for. (I used to say that British Ale was an acquired, acquired taste. Before I got used to warm Ale I used to think it tasted like dirty socks, now I can drink pints of it on special occasions when the chance arises.) These kinds of questions will lead us, as you know, to the big debates of our time and of all time: debates about Freedom, the nature of happiness, the existence and utility of supernatural beings, the immaterial soul vs. the self, how the brain works, what is consciousness and so on… Will we be able, as it were, to stand on our own shoulders as we share the pinnacle and the nadir of our quest?

At this level we might wish to pass on the usual circular philosophical arguments of the past 10,000 years and try to graduate, if I can be so bold, to the level of inquiry that requires knowledge of the skills, methodologies, tools and techniques of science. We might find it more exciting to experience, through the scientific process, what we can know at any given moment in the continuum of the scientific discovery of how nature works. We live in a time when there is so much fine output in the realm of the philosophy of the sciences. But before we can even go there, we need to be aware of the fields of science we want to talk about, and how they connect with each other and influence each other. The days of science silos is passing. We are aware now that everything is somehow connected. We can see the integral nature of things. Interdisciplinary scientific teams work at uncovering more truth, knowledge, and information than had ever existed since, let’s say, from 1995: a “Moore’s Law” of knowledge enjoyed by a small minority of the world’s population. We learn more and more each year it seems and yet most of us remain unaware of the miraculous progress made in the realm of the sciences.

Is it possible to find out what we truly want? And to answer the more difficult question: why do I want what I think I want? Can we use the methods of scientific inquiry to truly unmask the most profound meaning of our lives, our world and the Universe? Are we destined to explore the vastness of space or to become extinct in the mist of our dreams?

For many of us faith in something is enough to guide us through a meaningful life. Our curiosity has limits. We are fulfilled by the content of our emotional reaction to stories. We can fill in the meaning for ourselves in a contra causal sense of holding God’s hand. Many of us find “THE ANSWERS” and forgo the process of discovery. Some of us don’t need to know. It’s enough to be alive and wanting, yearning, hoping, seeking, healing, fighting, doing this and doing that. We are at home with our stories and free to interpret them as we will, or content to have the stories interpreted for us. We follow willingly and have faith that the outcome will be for the best. I remember a pastor friend of mine explaining the metaphor that we are sheep and God is our benign and caring shepherd. I couldn’t help blurting out: of course a shepherd is good to his sheep, until he slaughters, skins, cleans, quarters, cooks and eats it. (Could it be that an unpredictable fate and death is what sustains God?) Comparing religions across many cultures reveals a colorful tapestry of very human stories covering almost everything, and religion continues to evolve all the time in every sect across the world. We can find meaning in money, in power, in fame, in possessions, in relationships to others, in teams, as members of groups and in achievement. Meaning literally litters our lives with value and noise.

(I have asked many friends of mine what they mean when they say that they are “traditional”. Not many have been able to answer me. One has to go far to the west, and keep going west until west is going east, to get an answer that makes one feel that they just jumped out of a time machine.)

I wonder, what is the utility of having everything utterly mapped out for one’s life? I would rather get lost a thousand times and create my own map out of my experience of seeking for the sake of knowing, than to imagine that I have a map to an ultimate destination. A kind of life for life’s sake, but with the cherry on top of discovery, new knowledge, understanding how things work, how my brain and body works: and if this sounds stressful, perhaps it’s the good kind of stress. The stress that makes you keep growing, that tells your mind and body that it is still in the game, that it is still developing, is the kind of stress we all need to feel truly alive. Toxic stress comes from over doing it or doing nothing. Laziness kills just as easily as seeking thrills. Addiction to things we can’t control and do not want often results. To be in control one has to relinquish control and accept that many things influence us all the time. Understanding as much as we can about all the things that influence us manifests the road to inner peace and power. (I mean what I just said in the context of a matrix of life and awareness.) I would rather learn that I had always been wrong that to wallow in the mire of false belief and fantasy.


Julian, talented thespian with more to act than the psycho/physical…

In the beginning of the book by Julian Jaynes, “The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, we find a Socratic dialogue between Gregory Bateson and his daughter on why things always seem to get in a muddle. This is often quoted in various psychological journals, and books. Basically the point of the dialogue is that other people always muddle up your things, or if you mess with other people’s things, their things will get muddled up. We always have our own way of organizing things that we think, for the moment at least, is ideal, and we don’t want someone to come along and muddle things up. For an anthropologist like Bateson who studied and did many things, (I love people who master something and then move deftly on to mastering something else) he worried about the random influence a person or culture can have on another person or culture. These influences can be ultimately positive in a certain context, or ultimately negative as viewed from a certain perspective, or understood in a certain context. (I was truly heartbroken by the changes I noticed in Bali after having visited in the 1970s and then going back in the 1990s. It was spoiled for me, but it had moved on and evolved. It was a comfy place for tourists, but had lost much of its magic.) We are all influenced and there is nothing we can do about it. Once one realizes that there is an infinite number of ways for one’s perfectly organized “something” to be muddled up, one is also left with the realization that there is an infinite number of ways to organize something. In truth, it all depends on what we are talking about. There are laws of nature after all, and accepted theories that only seem to get more sublime and streamlined as our knowledge and tools evolve. There was a perfect Ferrari racing car in the 1960s and there is an equally perfect version of one now. There may be strings singing the Universe as we know it, or modeling something we will never be able to know, but in some way perceive. This is what I am getting at when I talk about the process of the perfection of the evolution of ideals. In a way, if we truly work hard in a qualitative sense, things can only get better. There will be a lot of hiccups and dangers on the way: Global warming, nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction, the loss of bio diversity, poverty, ignorance and all the other deadly sins piled up in populations of people “at the mercy of roles and stereotypes”… We can find the solutions if we have enough time, if we create enough intellectual resources to invent solutions, and if we can learn from our mistakes. We are always just one mistake away from brilliance! The only way to ascertain whether something we have a hand in is evolving towards something better is to examine the reality of the thing itself, its qualities, its nature, how it interacts with everything around it, its context, its purpose and all the other values that go into a certain way of organizing something. We are in a fluid state, re-engineering, reorganizing, rethinking and reforming what came before. Now, it seems, we either evolve (implying the choice to do so; or the audacity to believe we can do so…) or we die.


I would rather see a man’s life in his face than look at a mummy. Gregory’s face speaks volumes!

To contemplate a past that doesn’t exist here and now and a future that doesn’t exist here and now can only teach us so much. In every moment there is, if given the resources, education, curiosity, vitality and energy, the potential to create, to understand, to appreciate, to nurture, to love, to rise up to ever greater heights and delve into greater depths of knowledge and skill; and in the end to have the feeling that you have lived in concert with everything else and made a kind of wonderful music.

What do we want? Any advertisement, marketing campaign, PR campaign, preacher, salesman, addiction, story, person or impulse can easily answer that question for us. (I’m viewing, the Situationists! It may seem an odd and dated reference, but in some ways mixing it up with the more innocent and passionate days of our recent history can speak volumes to our current circumstances. Fox News amazes and sickens in its unabashed biases.) Why do we want what we think we want is another matter altogether, one that requires more effort, passion and energy and one that yields more meaning, truth and knowledge. I would rather be on the field playing, getting hurt sometimes, healing and moving on, then to sit on the sidelines and be a “witness” to life as a mind trick. As we analyze our efforts to grow over a long period of changing perceptions of reality, wisdom and peace may prevail and push us all towards a fate greater than fancy. We only have to fall in love with doing the work.

The young and passionate radicals of art and passion.

In my next post I will talk a bit about the concept of the benevolent king, “the parable of tribes” and how we might influence the evolution of democracy.

What can we do to experience more meaning and happiness?

Is human nature really nasty, brutish and cruel?

I have recently read a book by Dacher Kelner titled, "Born To Be Good: The Science Of A Meaningful Life". You can hear a good interview with Dacher at Point of Inquiry: www.pointofinquiry.org. I'm not going to attempt a book review. If you Google the title you will find many good reviews of the book. I just want to share a few thoughts that flowed through my mind while reading the book.

One thing I really enjoy is discovering how science can help us understand all kinds of things about human life and behavior. Wherever we are from, whatever culture we belong to, whatever influences inform our ideas and opinions, we are all related and share more things than we may be conscious of. From a scientific point of view, we are all part of the same family, Homo sapiens, we're just people, and we can learn a lot about our species through scientific inquiry.

As as I compare my former mystical outlook to my current scientific outlook, I encounter, yet again, a common reaction I have to my current interests and reading: the feeling that the ideas I am engaged in are familiar, that there is a ring of truth to them that goes way back to things I was aware of when I was younger and much less interested in science. It's an intuitive feeling that, "ya, this makes sense, I've always known this somehow". And sometimes when I'm reading some new theory about how memory works or how human emotion is a very important element of human intelligence, I get a strong sense of Déjà vu.

I remember years ago thinking that all office buildings were sculptures or monuments designed by arrogant architects, erected to make us feel part of a powerful society, by a manipulative establishment. I guess I was a kind of retro hippy. I also thought science was something smart people did, and that people like me could never really grasp the complex processes and methods of science outside of an entertaining, popularized treatment of the subject.

I remember loving Carl Sagan’s, “Cosmos”, and being able to make my friends chuckle with my impersonation of him. I could become intolerable when, “becoming Carl”, would mean a day or two of constantly being in character. During the early 1980s I was much more interested in Art, metaphysics, film, theater, music, religion, history of religion, anthropology, pop psychology, psychology, indigenous cultures, cultural musicology, mysticism, martial arts, dance, poetry, acting, and in a more peripheral way, new age movements, self help movements, and “Ways” of life leading to immortality: although I was generally more critical of these last categories.

It is interesting, and this is really my main point here, that some of the insights I seem to remember having throughout my life are constantly being validated by science. Learning about scientific methodologies, skill sets, and understanding the processes that govern scientific research has given me the confidence to delve deeper into subjects that are extremely fascinating. This new found confidence has taken the sting out of the anxiety produced by the rigors of the “Way” of science.

I was always an outgoing kid, ready to tease in a playful way, handy with a joke, good at role playing, energetic, physical, affectionate, good with kids younger than myself and able to relate to people older than me, a bit naughty, fun loving, and sometimes, like most kids, I was mean. I remember having a good time as a child and young adult. I also remember being a bit of an outsider. I was an odd mix of nerd and sosh. Some of the friends I most adored, my most difficult friends, were complicated intellectuals, geeky types that I found interesting. The in crowd just got a bit boring for me. Since I didn’t really know where I fit in I cultivated a sense of being comfortable in my own world. This didn’t mean that I was devoid of insecurities or without my bad’n’sad patches, I had plenty of them, but I remained for the most part, comfortable in my own skin. I also remember somehow being able to move on when relationships didn’t seem to be working any more. I would feel grief at the end of something while at the same time feeling excited about what was to come.

So now I look back at the through line of the narrative of my life and see that my natural curiosity and ease with which I could continue to grow, even when it meant giving up former ways of being and viewing myself and the world, has allowed me the freedom to experience what I consider to have been a happy life. I sense that my life will continue to get even better, more meaningful, and happier. I really must consider myself lucky.

I often reflect deeply and carefully when I hear about people who suddenly fall ill with a life threatening disease or people suffering from deep and chronic depression. I wonder how I would do if I were in their situation. I have a feeling that I would accept the facts, seek the best treatment I could find and afford, and try to be positive and hope for some good luck while still trying to find ways to entertain myself and make things a bit easier on my friends. But I'll never know until I have to face such challenges. So again, I count my blessings and try to be more empathetic and compassionate towards those less fortunate. It can be an awkward duty to care.

Survival through tough times is hard enough, but what about being happy? Being able to entertain yourself is a gift even greater than being able to entertain others. But which is more important? One thing is for sure; I suffer no guilt at being able to amuse myself. And sometime I put a distance between me and those people around me who just don't get the joke or understand my point of view. Creating distance is important sometimes. We all have to focus on things that are important and meaningful to us, and to a certain degree stay away from people or things that hold us back. But we also should work harder at building connections, bridges, understanding between those who we wouldn't normally feel close to. It's truly liberating to deffer your judgment in favor of listening and understanding. Sometimes when we succeed at this we even find value where we thought none existed. It may be hard to find a true friend, but it's not that hard to be friendly. It may be difficult to find one's true love, but it's not that difficult to be loving. Cultivating these two simple attitudes can make a person much happier!

Brian Dunning's recent podcast at skeptoid.com, "Sarah Palin Is Not Stupid", makes the point that Ad Homonym attacks or just calling someone who thinks differently than you do a nut job or moron is way off the mark. Such behavior will definitely not lead to happiness and a meaningful life. We really should try to engage people in positive ways that encourage the quest for truth. Calling people stupid echoes back stupid. My grandmother used to say, "It takes all kinds of people to make the world go around."

Connecting with yourself is as important as connecting with others. The saying, "be good to yourself", is good advice.

One of my friends told me recently that she was prepared to be a spinster if she couldn’t meet the right man and then went on to say that that didn’t mean she wanted to be a spinster and to point out all the research that shows that married couples do better than single people in a number of ways. (This woman is currently studying to take medical board exams.) I agreed and said that it’s also important to know how to be with yourself. I meant that in a myriad of interpretations of the phrase. How should I be with myself? How should I treat myself? How can I accompany myself on this journey through life and what kind of me should I be? Can I be my best friend? I am not a dualist by the way. I just think that it's useful to have a dialogue with yourself sometimes. We all do it. I also pointed out to her that many ascetics, monks, artists, seekers, travelers, academics, scientists and explorers have benefited from solitude. Sometimes it’s wonderful just to be with yourself. To become the being; to be the being; to simply be; or to be what you like. It's very good to take time to simply listen to yourself in a relaxed way. Pull off the fast lane for a little while each day and enjoy the simple things and enjoy YOUR SELF.

It’s amazing to me that reading about chemicals in the brain, how Charles Darwin thought about the importance of human relationships, the meaning of common facial expressions, the importance of embarrassment and teasing behaviors, how the neuro system is plastic and how through the practice of certain behaviors and environmental input one can shape one’s mind and body in such a way as to lead one to a life of greater happiness and meaning. To learn that there is an evolutionary basis for awe, and higher order emotions such as rapture, and that just learning about or being in the presence of beauty, art, good music, gardens, to “walk in beauty” as they say, can help dwarf ones obsession with self interest and give one a greater sense of purpose.

In his interview with DJ Grothie from Point of Inquiry, Dacher refers a lot to Ren characteristics. Ren comes from Confucianism and basically refers to the social responsibility of bringing the best out of others, or to bring the good of others to fruition, or to be in harmony with one's place in society.

"There is a government, when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son." (Analects XII, 11, trans. Legge)

From his ruminations on the Ren principle, Dacher created a simple and profound formula that can help us measure our ability to achieve a more Ren life.

Numerator = What did you do to bring out the good in others

Denominator = What did you do to bring out the bad in others

The higher the score the more happy and meaningful your life is.

I seem to have always known this. That doesn’t mean that my score has always been high however. I hope that using this formula will help me achieve a higher score.

The book is full of interesting science that supports his ideas. The combination of science and references to Eastern Traditions brought me back to intuitive beliefs that bring me closer to that “Being” I want to “Be” with. It has also heightened my desire to help people be the best they can be. It surely is good behavior to look for the best in a person and go from there.

I took my books on eastern philosophy, religion and mysticism, to the used book store a long time ago. My books shelves and iPod are now full of books about science, skepticism, history, biography and other works of non fiction. I am a naturalist. I am happy however, that reading Born to be Good, has reinforced my belief that it is possible to overlook or downplay the negative aspects of traditions in favor of their positive aspects; allowing us to keep valuable and useful insights that are natural and integral to human experience.

Be good to yourself!

LINKS:

http://www.paulekman.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbicularis_oculi_muscle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygomaticus_major_muscle

http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~lparr/shortmanualMaqFACS.html

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761553693/confucianism.html

http://psychology.berkeley.edu/faculty/profiles/rhelson.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagus_nerve

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropeptide

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~keltner/

http://www.skeptoid.com

An Affirmation

I started traveling when I was still inside my dear mother's belly and have never stopped. This GREAT EARTH is by cosmic standards small, unique (as far as we know), and beautiful. The Earth doesn't need humanity but we need the Earth. We are part and parcel of the environment in which we live and we are extremely lucky that the environment has been so kind to us for so long, even if our “long time” is just a sneeze within the time scale of the life of the Universe: this is still OUR time. I am not a magical thinker, but I value magic. I know so little and am immensely curious. Human intelligence is profoundly attractive to me. Learning how things really work and engaging in the process of the evolution of ideals in human culture is an important and wondrous pursuit. Our current age of science and technology is, it seems to me, a most exciting time to be alive. I think we are living in a time when more and more people can learn how to take advantage of what we are finding out about Nature through the rigors of science. Life should never be boring. This is a time to explore, inquire, learn and grow. Thoughtful people who care about reality and truth are the ones holding the future of humanity in their MINDS; we should appreciate them. Today we have important choices to make, choices that are crucial to the future of our humble species. I believe that being faced with these important choices is a privilege we should enjoy and cherish. Let’s not waste a moment, let's learn all we can and do our best. Life is short!

What do I want? I want to keep my good health, study as much as I can in as many domains of science that I can find time for (albeit in an unfortunately superficial way); learn as much about the Universe, the Earth, the Human brain and Mind, culture, and history, as I can; find a way to move through life with wisdom, grace, patients, thankfulness, understanding, compassion, humility and trust; make as many dear, close friends as I can, and treasure those relationships; achieve what I can for myself, and work for the benefit of others; have way too much fun; be intelligent, quirky, bright, friendly, loving, goofy and enjoy the "hell" right out of life! In short, to wake up every morning and go to bed every night thinking that the whole Universe must exist just to make me happy. This statement is an affirmation of an aspect of MY golden rule. It seems so intuitive and natural to me that I just want to share it. Wouldn't it be nice if more people thought that the Universe exists just to give them the experience of happiness and joy? I think most of us would like that for people. We all have to contribute to help make this so.

Why do I want what I want? Well, that’s a complicated narrative and one that takes a much greater effort to articulate than would possible in this venue right now. To obtain and maintain a clear understanding of that question I must continually examine myself and everything else. What do I want might be easy to answer, but why do I want what I want can get really confusing.

We are all, in some ways, slaves to fashion after all. We are batted and knocked around by so many things in our world, our environment, or bodies, our cultures, our minds; that it becomes very challenging to discern why we do what we do. There are many amazingly intelligent women and men than I have written profoundly insightful volumes about such matters. I am still wading through it all and trying to make sense of the ideas, the insights, the information, the evidence that they have brought me; knowing with great joy that it will make my understanding of life more exciting, my thoughts clearer and allow me to become a more effective contributor to our culture.

It’s hard to interpret the narrative of my life’s experiences; to frame it in a way that will allow me to accept all that was good and horrible and still have the illusion of coherence, purpose and meaning. The reality of this "illusion" or "experience" is the thing that matters to me and it seems that if I can get it just right, shape it and bend it with my evolving consciousness, in the moment, and sync my actions with my hopes, I will feel the passionate triumph of a great achievement, that of having really enjoyed life. The peace that comes with this kind of sense of completeness is a vast awareness of just how humble we are, how special we are and how temporary everything is. Expanding into the vastness of time is the end, the transformation of one form into another, a never ending process.

Although my thoughts may seem to me now to be almost mystical, it’s not the supernatural that I am amazed by, this need for something outside the realm of our experience, the need to transcend nature, does not come anywhere near the knowledge that we are gaining about our world everyday; our models of how things work and how things are, are developing, more and more, year by year, and we are networked via this fantastic technology to one another allowing us to share our consistent discoveries. We can throw our ideas out into the public light of a Global community of reason to be contemplated and digested, to be tested and experimented on, to be critiqued and ripped apart, to be lambasted and ridiculed, to be appreciated, pondered over, reminisced about, and to be changed into slightly truer versions of things we thought we had envisioned but had not yet even glimpsed.

Our self correcting, constantly evolving, always learning, intellectually curious culture is growing right before our eyes. While the blind corporate, commercial media chases its tail in an endless quest for money, power, influence, and attention, another gang is growing and unstoppable. Thinking people asking the right questions, seeing through the technique, the spin and the fallacious logic of stories just meant to infotain or to push an ideological or political agenda. I honestly can feel this gang growing, and one by one this gang of thoughtful explorers will become a force unlike anything we have ever seen in history.

I can’t even imagine right now what the result of this shift will be: when a much larger percentage of people in the world will be able to muster their thinking skills to a high degree. I can imagine though, that this will bring about a sense of liberty that even Thomas Paine would not have imagined. What kind of world will it be when it is no longer acceptable to think that it’s OK to have billions of people who are uneducated, unaware of what’s happening in the sciences, unsure about what is happening to determine their fate, and unable to intellectually fend for themselves?

I am dedicating myself right now helping others find the light of reason and the joy of intellectual curiosity. They say that like attracts like. Maybe there are people out there particularly fine tuned to hear my message, or your message, or the message of those we recommend. It is these people that I hope to find and partner with, in the quest to reveal the power of human reason, skepticism, and science. And it is for the people on the borderline between the empty pursuit of fantasy and the sudden realization of the power of human minds and culture that I know we dedicate our work.

This blog is a part of my daily journey towards a greater understanding of my self, my community, the Universe and everything in it. I hope some of you will join me. I look forward to hearing from you, learning from you, getting to know you, and arguing to discover, knowing we can’t injure ourselves.

With deep appreciation,

Presentmind…

The Evolution of Ideals

Culture Spheres examines a unique model of interpreting values in human culture.