Reflection 270: Nursery Rhymes

Copyright 2012 by Steve Perrin.

We learn to engage the world around us in earliest childhood, starting in the womb when our mother is our environment, and then expanding on that beginning when we are born. Sooner or later we encounter nursery rhymes, which help us consolidate loops of engagement we have begun on our own. Take this one, for example:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.

Imagine engaging with the stars! But even though we haven’t a clue what they might be, we gape nonetheless at their splendor because they’re unlike anything else in our experience. In this case, that little star is probably the planet Venus, apt to be the most striking object in the western sky before bedtime. That point of light fills us with wonder and curiosity. As children, we aren’t likely to compare such a sight to a diamond in the sky. That would be be the voice of our culture speaking. But the salience of the sensory impression alone would arouse us, kindling consciousness at the same time so that both the image and the rhyme stay with us for a lifetime.

Mirror, mirror, tell me,
Am I pretty or plain?
Or am I downright ugly
And ugly to remain?

Shall I marry a gentleman?
Shall I marry a clown?
Or shall I marry old Knives-and-Scissors
Shouting through the town?

Here is youthful curiosity again, looking toward the future at the possibilities for engagement it might offer. The issue seems to be driven more by wonder than anxiety: what will be my lot in life when I grow up? The one approaching the mirror is asking what fate has in store for her, not what she can bring about for herself. Old Knives and Scissors would be every bit as worthy as clown or gentleman. Being pretty, plain, or ugly is not under her control; it is destiny’s call. The culture she is growing into is preparing her to accept her fate however it turns out. In the meantime, we all know that we all can affect our fates by how we choose to make ourselves happen as we go.

1. He loves me.
2. He don’t!
3. He’ll have me.
4. He won’t!
5. He would if he could.
6. But he can’t.
7. So he don’t.

The numbers here count petals being plucked from a flower. The issue is decided when the last petal is reached. This simple procedure of keying answers to a finite number of questions is a crude device meant as an aid to reviewing indeterminate issues. The point is not to settle the issue but to bring possible solutions to the forefront of attention. The benefit flows from playing with the engagement itself in a lighthearted manner as if it could be settled once and for all. Turning life decisions into simple routines is a means of dealing with underlying uncertainties.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses,
And all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

This rhyme is a reminder that some engagements come to a bad end. No matter what resources you bring into play, things will never work out. Keeping in mind an image of Humpty as an egg drives home the message: some things are best scrambled.

Jack Sprat could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean;
And so betwixt them both, you see,
They licked the platter clean.

The message here is that complementary engagements promote harmony amid diversity. It’s OK for people to be of different persuasions if they all fit into the big picture.

If you wish to live and thrive,
Let the spider walk alive.

This rhyme embraces the engagement between people and those of the arachnid persuasion, assuming the prescriptive weight of a proverb or aphorism. Committed to memory, it reminds us at sight of a spider that it takes many creatures to build a world, including weavers of intricate webs who happen to eat insects.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Sets all heaven in a rage.

Again, the voice of conventional wisdom aimed at little ears for rote memorization as a guide to subsequent restraint.

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
That was the end
Of Solomon Grundy.

This rhyme reinforces recitation of the days of the week in proper sequence by linking it to the natural order of life events. This is the old mnemonist’s trick of pegging a random list of things to an order internalized through repeated experience such as a stroll along a familiar street or the arrangement of familiar body parts. The drama and fun here come from the compression of major life events into the span of a single week, making the sequence of days all the more memorable. It helps to have all the lines end with the same sound and share the same rhythm. Ever after this rhyme is learned, engagements will seem naturally to accord with the days of the week.

Mary had a little lamb,
It’s fleece was white as snow;
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.

It followed her to school one day,
That was against the rule;
It made the children laugh and play,
To see a lamb in school.

And so the teacher turned it out,
But still it lingered near,
And waited patiently about
Till Mary did appear.

Why does the lamb love Mary so?
The eager children cry;
Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know,
The teacher did reply.

Engagements have rules, it turns out. Lambs are OK at home, but not at school. The tale is more about the lamb than Mary, but it is Mary’s attachment for the lamb that gives the story punch. The narrative unfolds from a brief description of the lamb to telling what it did one day, what happened next, and ends with an insight as to why things went as they did, brought home by a simple question. This rhyme is a paradigm for building a story that has characters, action, consequences, and a message. Rhyme and meter help make it memorable for use in future engagements or writing assignments.

Six little mice sat down to spin;
Pussy passed by and she peeped in.
What are you doing, my little men?
Weaving coats for gentlemen.
Shall I come in and cut off your threads?
No, no, Mistress Pussy, you’d bite off our heads.
Oh, no, I’ll not; I’ll help you to spin.
That may be so, but you can’t come in.

Another narrative based on the age-old rivalry between mice and cats. This time, the mice aren’t fooled by Pussy’s soft words, providing an example meant for children to take to heart in conducting their own engagements. How others choose to engage with you may well differ from how you would choose to deal with them, providing a model for future reference when needed. Many nursery rhymes and other early readings depict situations in which children should learn to be on their guard without someone being around to warn, “Now be careful.”

Who are you? A dirty old man
I’ve always been since the day I began,
Mother and Father were dirty before me,
Hot or cold water has never come o’er me.

This unexpected answer to an ordinary question achieves a humorous effect, but it rouses consciousness from its customary slumber, priming awareness to perk up at the thought of dirty old men (or, indeed, women). I can hear kids mouthing this rhyme as they head for a bath, reveling in the virtue of cleanliness as the rhyme advises by default.

I do not like you, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

This rhyme makes no forward motion at all, despite a modest show of trying. It would be humorous if it did not reveal so set a mind. The humor here is like laughing at someone stuck in the mud. It illustrates a disdain for ridicule or non-engagement. Something about you, Doctor Fell, turns me off; I can’t get started with you. There’s no telling what the problem is, or how it began. My advice to those whose engagement is blocked in this way is to look into themselves to see if they can’t identify the problem. It’s there waiting to be discovered.

I’ll end this brief review of nursery-rhyme engagements with the challenge Doctor Fell poses for us all. To engage or not engage, that is the question. Whatever the cause, a good part of it lies with each one of us. If we are to get beyond the childish level of engagement we picked up in our earliest days, we must do our share of the heavy lifting required.

I will leave it at that, As ever, y’r friend, –Steve

Reflection 269: Listening

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

We talk a lot about free speech, but hear little about free listening. Yet listening to others is the secret to productive cooperation and engagement. Much talk is about projecting personal opinions onto others. How productive is that? It’s a loser’s game, a cheap substitute for the hard work of developing respect and open mindedness, both of which take listening to what others have learned from their personal experience—and that is bound to be different from what we have learned on our own.

Listening solely to yourself means listening to one person out of seven billion unique individuals. Opening yourself to all those others expands the pool of potential learning, insight, and understanding to an almost infinite degree. Imagine having a staff of advisors so large and so wise. But no, instead of learning what we can, we keep spouting the same stale beliefs handed down through the generations as if they were universal truth itself, suggesting that we have known the answers all along and have no need to listen to those who differ from us.

The wise man on his mountain pinnacle has made every mistake in the book of life, and yet always has one more angle he hasn’t tried, which he is glad to share with us lowlanders as if it were the distillation of universal truth—which it isn’t because it’s the one mistake he hasn’t made up till now. Where are modesty and humility when we need them most?, those priceless attributes of true wisdom. We tell children to keep their mouths shut and ears open, but that’s good advice for grownups as well—to stop talking so we can cock our ears and start listening.

Listening entails opening the inner world in which we live to others. Which doesn’t happen automatically by simply being in their presence. It requires inviting them in. Opening our selves to them. Which may prove dangerous if we let them get too close. But all new learning is dangerous because it forces us to grow—as the birch must rip its own bark in becoming larger.

If we keep to our inner bastions to stay safe, where’s the adventure in that? Where’s the opportunity for discovery, excitement, or friendship? For growing into greater understanding? Fear of what we might expose ourselves to leads us to keep to ourselves in order to preserve who we are without thinking who we might become if we let down our guard.

Listening is the secret to effective engagements with others. It lets them be themselves while we are ourselves. Putting those two together is the adventure of a lifetime. We never know what will happen—except that we will be larger as a result. As I grew larger last night while listening to thunder roll through the hills of Bar Harbor, thunder that spoke to me in emphatic phrases of deep, rumbling complexity. I’d never heard sounds like that before, or never let myself hear them. But there they were, asking me to rise to their level of expression and understanding. I can’t tell you what I learned because it was wholly nonverbal. But those earth sounds were profound, I could tell. Earth was trying to tell me something about how insignificant I am among its wonders, how ignorant I am in claiming to know what I think I know but am surely wrong. Yes, it’s risky listening to such voices. But, I would add, also necessary. Why else are we here?

My personal school of engagement assigns me to listen to thunder as closely as I listen to song sparrows and eagles, to loons and hermit thrushes. To quaking aspen, lapping waves, and sleeping babies. Ears are given us to actively engage our surroundings by forming sensory impressions. Which we recognize as instances of one conceptual category or another, and then fit into an appropriate compartment within our grand field of universal understanding, our personal version of the way of the world as taught through personal experience.

I wish I could say I have treasured my ears as gateways to my smattering of world understanding, but in fact I have carelessly abused them from time to time by listening to the likes of gunshots and internal combustion engines, so, since age forty, my ears have been clanging (more than ringing) ceaselessly for some thirty-nine years—just about half my life. Every voice must compete with that distraction if I am to add it to my repertory of sounds heard. For this I can blame no one but myself. I take full responsibility for this impairment, and the regrets that go with it.

My eyes, too, are not what they were. Since I was a child, I have immensely enjoyed the gift of eyesight, and celebrated it through photography, which allows me to focus carefully on a great many visual wonders. But like my camera itself, which broke down last week and no longer works, my eyesight is perturbed by glare from above, and astigmatism presents me with twin images of even Jupiter’s sparkling moons. My computer hard drives are filled to the last digit with images, serving as a kind of visual autobiography of things I have witnessed during my life—a rough opus composed of gifts received through my eyes.

My listening more aptly applies to sounds people have made in my presence. I have been calibrated by the culture I grew up in to find meaningful those sounds expressed in English, so it is those I pay particular attention to and find great joy in hearing and comprehending as I manage to do. Including my own utterances in response to the sounds others make as I strive to get the most meaning into fewest words for clarity’s sake. Or try to do even though I rarely succeed, more often spouting the usual garble of my authentic inner voice.

Indeed, I truly believe that listening to others is founded on the fine art of listening to oneself. Or can be a fine art if we take care to make sure that what we actually say represents our core feelings and values at the moment. That is, if we use speech to be who we are rather than as a means of charming others into believing what we want them to believe about us.

Personally, I aspire to sing with the simple eloquence of a hermit thrush by actively paying attention to how such birds run the rills that they do. Or to deliver myself like thunder when the situation demands such a voice by studying over and again the richness and tonality of that sound in the original. That is, I learn to talk by listening to the range of sounds I am exposed to, and then choosing from among them the voice I find most apt to the occasion I find myself in.

Last evening I spoke at a hearing on the future management of resources in Taunton Bay, employing the diction I had learned by listening to the bay itself for much of my life. Today at noon I will present a Peace Award to a senior about to graduate from my local high school, relying on the voice of nonviolent engagement I have acquired through long commitment to the Quaker persuasion. As we listen, so do we consider, and then speak. That’s where words come from—the care with which we listen to the voices of every sort around us throughout or lives.

Listening is a primary form of engagement that bestows gifts on us by opening us to the options we have in being ourselves on specific occasions so that when our turn comes to speak, the words we need to say are available in the repertory of sounds we have found personally arousing and meaningful.

Do you hear me? Or is the ringing in your ears too loud so all that you can hear is yourself? In that case, take up not bird-watching but bird-listening. Explore what is possible and you will find a voice that will carry what it is you want to say.

That’s it for today. As always, I remain y’r friend. –Steve

Technorati Tags: listening,where do words come from,thunder,loons,hermit thrush,eagles,song sparrows,finding your voice,listening to yourself,free speech,free listening,modesty,humility

Reflection 268: Nightmare

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

The thrust of consciousness is action in keeping with our personal memories, feelings, values, and concerns.        –myndloop.com

Consciousness is given us to achieve actions in the world that are appropriate to the situation we are in at the time, which we then adjust to the time after that, and the one after that, . . . after that. Which is far more complicated than simultaneous hand-eye coordination in being sequential for the duration of our individual lives. Consciousness evolves from one stage to the next, which points to the key role that memory plays as the platform on which each successive moment of consciousness is based—producing our respective streams of consciousness.

Without having a ready reference to each preceding moment, we could not enjoy the benefits of building a future for ourselves because we would forget where we were in the process and where we were heading. Resulting in the end of consciousness as we know it.

Yesterday I spent time on an island on the coast of Maine where I engaged with loons (which I both saw and heard), hermit thrushes and song sparrows (which I heard only), and an immature bald eagle (which I saw only). I say I engaged with these birds because my separate moments of attention built instant-by-instant across spans of up to thirty minutes. Without memory, I would never have achieved such enduring levels of engaged consciousness.

These engagements included not only the sensory impressions I formed one after another as the loons—there were five of them—called and moved about, but my interpretations of those sensory images as well, along with my understanding of loon behavior, the feelings aroused by that behavior, and my actions in raising, lowering, focusing, and sharing my binoculars with my companion.

I watched two loons circling each other, then diving, while a third loon farther off hooted, then ran across the water (I could hear the pat-pat-pat) leaving a wake of white splashes behind it for several hundred feet. A fourth loon called in the distance, and somewhat later a fifth loon surfaced after a long dive. All on an incoming tide bringing herring and other delectables into the bay. I’d say a good time was had by the parties engaged, including me. Which applies equally to the separate incidents with song sparrow, hermit thrush, and eagle.

Consciousness results from the application of personal attention to these kinds of events over time. Each incident flows from a commitment of attention for the duration of a particular engage-ment. This happens, then this, and then this. So consciousness emerges as a succession of memorable moments. Or, put differently, without memory we would dwell in a fog of disjointed events vanishing into emptiness inhabited only by simultaneous yearning and profound sense of loss, though we’ll never recall what it was that we lost.

All of which leads up to the dream I woke up from this morning. The imagery was not of birds but of some kind of performance I was involved in. A group of us was to deliver a recitation before a dignified audience in what seemed to be a structure such as a church or library. The issue being that I hadn’t memorized my part, and wasn’t sure if I could find it written out somewhere, though I suspected the best place to look for it would be in my room. Which I thought was in a large brick building, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I wasn’t dressed for the presentation, so was wandering along city streets, trying to get a glimpse of where I lived. I wanted to tell the man in charge of the performance that I was not prepared because I couldn’t find my script or my clothes, but I couldn’t find him. In the dream I was in that stupor resulting from not being engaged with anything. All I had were yearnings I could not direct or fulfill.

Lying in bed, I thought this is what H.M. must have felt like because his anterograde amnesia deprived him of the ability to form new memories after a brain operation to lessen the effect of severe epileptic fits. He was much researched and written-up in the second half of the twentieth century, and you couldn’t study psychology without coming across the story of H.M. He retained memories from before the operation, but was unable to form new memories after that event. He’d go out for a walk, and couldn’t remember where he was going, or where “back” was where he’d started out from.

That was my situation in my dream. I’d lost the ability to form new memories, so wafted about in a fog of uncertain yearnings, feeling terrible the whole time because I knew I was supposed to be doing something but wasn’t sure what it was or how to do it. If being crazy means losing your mind, I was dream crazy in having no way to find the mind and sense of engagement I once possessed but had no way to retrieve. Leaving me wandering around feeling awful among others who seemed filled with purpose.

That’s what my unconscious mind does with my preoccupation with loops of engagement as the source of conscious meaning in my life. The dream was apparently based on my participation in two evenings of PetchaKutcha at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. That’s the connection I made when I woke up. PetchaKutcha (meaning “blink of an eye” in Japanese) consist of twenty slides, each on the screen for twenty seconds, amounting to a presentation lasting six minutes and forty seconds. End of show; on to the next.

On the island surrounded by loons, I’d tried to download a video of my performance in Waterville a year ago onto my iPad, but could only get the twenty slides I showed without the track of what I’d said. That disjointed engagement fed into my growing understanding of how loops of engagement give birth to consciousness, providing a classic illustration of the chaos resulting from not being able to remember, forestalling the possibility of engagement.

The loons, download attempt, PetchaKucha, and concern with conscious engagements all blended into a nightmare in which I lived the agony of being in a coma incapable of sustaining consciousness, along with a pinch of dread at the fear of dying before I finish my work. That is the space in which I live these days, the space into which loons and PetchaKutcha emerge as milestones marking the winding-down of a life devoted to understanding consciousness through self-reflection.

Does it matter? It does to me. I believe that loops of conscious engagement offer a way of understanding why our relationships get so garbled as they often do, leading to conflict and often violent reactions.

America’s disastrous military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, stem from our then leaders’ loops of engagement with what they dubbed “terrorists”—as if a roving band of disgruntled youths sprang up from nowhere like so many mice from old rags with the aim of bringing our civilization down without cause. Indeed, there was cause, but we could not entertain it because we exhibited no curiosity in resorting to blaming that band and their leaders as the original cause of our troubles without seeking out the underlying cause that motivated them. Which in fact extends back to the conduct of American military and industrial personnel in Saudi Arabia, personnel lacking the sensitivity and imagination to anticipate the effect of their carefree dress and behavior on people of another civilization centered on modesty and mutual respect.

The error on both sides was in resorting to violence, which we should know by now is never a solution. Leaving us living in our dreams, disgruntled, frustrated, looking for ways to destroy the other for their presumptions. So it goes, loops of hurt and fury instead of understanding and engagement. Instead of learning from our experience, we perpetrate further damage on our enemies as if they were always wrong and we always right instead of taking responsibility for engaging as equals out of mutual respect.

That, in short, is what I’m up to—trying to promote effective engagements appropriate to our true situation on a planet with low tolerance for chaos, aggression, and unexamined awareness.

The way out of this endless cycle? Checking on our engagements through careful scrutiny of our personal motivations and behaviors. It’s up to each of us individually lest our leaders betray us on their own authority and botch the engagements we carefully build up over a lifetime.

That’s where I’m at; where are you? Y’r friend, –Steve

 

Technorati Tags: memory,nightmare,consciousness,engagement,loop of engagement,stream of consciousness,loon,chaos,coma,fog,Iraq War,self-reflection,petchakutcha,H.M.

Reflection 267: Heeding the Call

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

If everybody recognizes and takes upon himself the duty to which he is called, genuine life will result. The civilization of an entire nation cannot be based on anything else. –Kathe Kollwitz, Diary

Heeding that call is the essence of individual life for it is nothing but the call heard only by those qualified to engage a particularly challenging situation. Those who don’t hear it need not apply.

The quote above comes from Samuel Putnam’s introduction to The Portable Cervantes. It begins:

I am not only allowed to finish my work, I am bidden to finish it. This, it seems to me, is the meaning of all the talk about civilization. It can exist only where each individual fills his own personal sphere of duty.

In so engaging our affairs, we complement one another because no two of us receive the same call. You do your part and I will do mine; all together we add up to a cooperative culture of unique individuals. Each of us doing our part—if it is to work at all, that is how the world must work.

It is no accident that that idea introduces The Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote De La Mancha, a work contrasting the as if world of elegant imagination with the world of purported reality, a conflict which artists endure every day of their lives. To be ourselves, we must engage as we are in the raw, not as others would polish our manners to make us palatable to their tastes.

There’s a lot of that kind of polishing going around, which I call pseudo engagement, fake engagement, false engagement—or out-and-out deception of self among others. The real prize is to hear the call from inside, not outside. The call not to please but to be. Since we have but the one life to live, whose life will it be? Who is to be the master of our engagements? Since we are the ones to die, if we are not master of our own vessel, whose life are we leading?

I put it that way because after thirty years of self-reflection, I can say that the only life worth living is the one directed from the inside in response to that call from the depths when it comes. If our engagements result from our working for a living to make enough money to live a comfortable life, we are engaging as others would have us, not as we must do out of personal necessity. What then do we stand for but willing enslavement to those more powerful and aggressive than ourselves? Imagine discovering on our deathbed that we have sold our individuality for a pittance to those who have no idea who we are. Willingly, we have ceased to exist.

That is why I place so much emphasis on loops of engagement to see if you can’t recognize your own before you inadvertently give it away, as is requested of each of us every day of our lives.

One effective way of making sure that you don’t give your personal authority and adventure away is to go to college to find out who you are rather than to pick up a discipline for making a living, or to find a mate, or to learn how to party or even manage sizeable credit card debt. The proper course of study in college is yourself since, whatever else you do, that’s who you will have to live with for the rest of your life.

The way to study yourself is through study of other selves, like Captain Ahab in his engagement with the great white whale; like Don Quixote in his engagement with his squire, Sancho Panza, and his noble lady, Dulcinea; like Socrates in his many engagements with his peers; like Raskolnikov in his engagement with an elderly woman and a police inspector following up on that affair; like leading characters in Shakespeare’s many plays; and so on. We learn to see our own engagements as reflected in the engagements of others, whether real, performed, or imagined.

That is, we learn about ourselves through comparison with others whose engagements are laid out clearly before us for examination and discussion. And closer to home, we begin to study ourselves in figuring out why we said this to such a one or did that to another. Through self-reflection we begin to grasp how we feel, what we value, how we see and understand, and to couple all that with what we decide to do about such matters. If we can take the role of our own most intimate teacher, we are set for a life of nonstop wonder and learning without limit.

Of course we can accomplish all that by taking a job sweeping floors, sorting mail, or washing dishes—while getting paid to learn from such a program. It all depends on what we are out for, what we hope to achieve by hopping from one stepping stone to another and the next beyond that. We get good at what we do in this life, what we pay attention to, and are determined to do better. That is, to learn about our loops of engagement by engaging with one thing after another. That, basically, is what education has to teach us in proportion to the attention and skill we put into each lesson. We learn what we reach for, not what others force down our throats.

My fee for delivering that homily is ten dollars. Don’t worry about it, I’ll put it on your tab with all the others. If you can’t pay in this life, I’ll collect in the next one. Your credit is good. As ever, I remain, y’r friend, –Steve

Technorati Tags: Don Quixote,Ahab,Raskolnikov,Socrates,Shakespeare,loop of engagement,engagement,college,learning,self-reflection,Kathe Kollwitz,hearing the call

Reflection 266: Or Is It Just Me?

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

Everywhere I look, I find loops of engagement whirring in other minds, striving to make sense of the world so that the owners of those minds can act appropriately in it. Or I find disengaged minds angry at the world for not cooperating with their covert desires.

Do loops of engagement exist as the basis of consciousness in individual minds—or is it just me projecting my fantasies onto all of humanity?

My life experience has led me to believe that conscious engagements are sparked in two ways. Either our sensory impressions convince us that our engagements with the world are even more effective in bringing about hoped-for states of affairs than we dared imagine, or those engagements fall far short of our hopes and expectations, leaving us in the lurch.

Whether we win or lose, are happy or sad, we are conscious of the situation we are in. Either way, we are engaged and have a clear grasp of what to work toward in the future. It is the middling, so-so state of neither winning or losing but being an also-ran that dulls consciousness into a “what else did you expect” state, when we resort to habitual performances requiring no special effort or attention. We can achieve that mental state of “business as usual” by coasting along without conscious exertion.

As I see it, good times and bad times both get us moving ahead by igniting consciousness and our loops of engagement. It is the in-between, blah times that dull our senses and actions, putting us to sleep on our feet, or into the coma that passes for everyday life.

Novelty wakes us up, as does calamity, joy, laughter, or sorrow. Therein lies the ignition of consciousness, with the goal of adopting a program of action in the world to sustain or remedy our situation in the world. So do we engage our surrounding situations with deliberate behavior, and invite those situations to engage our senses to apprise us of how we are doing. I see such looping engagements around me every day, and within me as I awaken to every moment of life.

My brain, as I see it, is the master comparator that holds my sensory impressions up against the intentions that led me to act, the resulting agreement or disparity telling me how I’m doing, and suggesting the direction I must take to do better. If my brain can invent depth perception from lateral displacement of images in two eyes, it surely can engender and maintain a dynamic interaction with my world situation. That is the origin of what I call the loop of engagement.

Everywhere I look, I see others engaging their worlds by venturing similar loops. Socratic dialogues are such loops written down in crude language. The exploits of Don Quixote reveal a man driven by a singular passion and sense of identity. As are Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear. As is every statesman and politician, celebrity, author, artist, musician, and dancer. All driven to engage, to review, to engage again.

I see exactly the same comparison in myself, the same drive and passion, the same adjustment, the same propulsion of awareness around and around in engagements with horseshoe crabs, eelgrass, eagles, producing books, writing blogs—being myself again and again, ever the same, but always in new ways. So do I seize my little world and fit myself to it through continuous adjustment. I do not think I’m crazy. Indeed, I am everyman and everywoman, doing my best to survive under difficult conditions.

Lately, I invariably come to the same conclusion. I am not crazy, just doing my thing because it’s the only way I know. My father wrote at his Underwood typewriter behind closed doors seventy-five years ago. Today, I write behind closed doors, as do my elder and younger brothers, turning out pages, thinking, reflecting, tearing up pages, starting anew. Growing weary, but always reviving to play out the game.

What could be simpler? Yet traditional psychology is baroque in comparison, needlessly complicated in conforming to the elaborate understandings of those who invented it. Engagements, yes, without archetypes, egos, ids, superegos and all the parts once thought necessary to consciousness but in the end explained nothing. Consciousness is energetic and kinetic, the result of interacting forces, not eternal qualities or capacities. At every stage, each instant of my life has resolved conflicting desires and inputs in the spur of the moment. I have made up my life as I have gone along, always striving, never finding the anchor I was looking for.

No, I haven’t amounted to much in this world, but I have been myself every inch of the way. My life has been my life because I made it happen as it did. It has always been my engagement and no one else’s. If I have internalized the ways of my father, that is my doing because that’s how I have learned to be myself, the one in charge of my singular engagement. When I die, that engagement will come to a halt. But for now I’m still at it.

How’s your engagement going? I hope you reflect on it daily and don’t think you are crazy. In my case, it’s just me; in yours, just you. Here we are living through these times side-by-side, doing our best to make sense of it all while being true to our innermost selves. What else can we do but occupy ourselves as we do? Y’r friend, –Steve

Technorati Tags: Socrates,Don Qixote,Hamlet,Lear,Othello,Macbeth,psychology,loop of engagement,consciousness,everyman,everywoman

Reflection 262: Clear as Mud

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

I have mud on my boots. On my pants. On my jacket. On my hands. Today, I know about mud because yesterday I put in a new mooring for my rowboat in Muddy Cove. The chain on the old mooring was worn, so I had to replace it, along with all the shackles that hold it together, and the buoy I attach my outhaul system to. Now that the job is done, I can stand on the shore and pull on a rope and have my boat out on the water dutifully respond to my will.

Here’s a photo of my boat at high tide.

And here’s Muddy Cove at low tide yesterday, with my bootprints in the mud.

The white buoy is the new one; the muddy one farther out is the old one I couldn’t undo the shackle on.

Trying to undo rusty shackles left in the mud for five years is hard because I couldn’t see what I was trying to do. The pins had been wired so they wouldn’t loosen up on their own. Using the braille method, I tried to cut the wire, and finally twisted it off, but then couldn’t turn the pin which was rusted fast. So I left the old buoy for another day when I have a hacksaw in hand.

It’s not only that I couldn’t see what I was working on, but moving around in the mud was so hard that I really had to exert myself to do the simplest thing. Shifting one foot took both concentration and strength because in lifting my boot, I was really lifting a huge clot of mud stuck to it by the vacuum hermetically binding me to the medium I was walking in. At each step I had to twist my heel sideways to unscrew myself from the gunk underfoot.

Being both functionally blind and barely able to move, I found it a tough job. But it had to be done, so I applied my full awareness to the task and eventually got it done to the best of my abilities under the circumstances. Such is consciousness. When the going gets tough, the tough grow determined and deliberate in paying particular attention to their engagements.

The point I want to make is metaphorical, so I won’t labor over the image any more than I already have. Consciousness is achieved through great personal effort. We have to put ourselves out in order to perform meaningful actions in the world—which often prove muddier than we imagined they could be. Expressing ourselves through appropriate engagements with our surroundings takes our best effort.

Yes, there are two kinds of people, those with open minds willing to do the work, and those with closed minds who know the right answer beforehand and go through the motions of applying rote solutions to complex situations.

We achieve alignment (or syzygy) between our sensory impressions, our understanding of a situation, and the actions through which we apply ourselves in solving life’s problems—we reach that desirable state only through sustained application of our mental capacities to work toward creative solutions using every skill we possess.

The alternative is to lay rote or ideological “solutions” onto novel situations so we can take credit for trying, at least, if not succeeding in settling one issue or another. The various peoples of the book do this all the time like so many missionaries citing chapter and verse as if every problem had been solved once and for all in days long before any of us were born, or the situations we face came to the fore. But memorized answers are often wide of the mark when applied to the modern circumstances of our lives.

“Go forth and multiply” is no solution to problems raised by there being too many of us living too high on the hog for too long a time at too great a rate of consumption. Mouthing the old words leaves us where we were in the old days, when what we need is solutions to the problems of today.

Old ways of doing things tend to muddy the waters when we are faced with novel situations. Only through application of creative consciousness taking modern circumstances into account can we see clearly toward a viable future. Habitual or outdated solutions to problems in business, finance, politics, religion, education, and other fields of endeavor are often no match for problems we fail to anticipate because our attention has been diverted in the meantime.

The Arab Spring and Occupy movement of 2011 were conducted by citizens rising to full consciousness and seeing the world in a new light. Seeing problems where others saw only business as usual, things as they should be.

Supple exercise of full consciousness is the only way to keep abreast of the times as they evolve into a slew of altogether new situations. If unable to walk on water, we must develop skills, attitudes, and strengths for braving the mud when we need to.

Ironically, schools teach only solutions to old problems, those that teachers can understand because they have lived through them. Formal education teaches to the past. It is in the experiential grasp of the students themselves that new learning should be sought.

I advocate for introspection and self-reflection as guides to the future. That’s why I am writing this blog. Which is much like walking through mud, but I see no other way because firmer ground lies on the far side of our current understanding of ourselves. If we don’t face into our own minds and experience, who indeed has the credentials for leading us into the future? Who else will place the buoys we need to moor ourselves to?

Striving, always striving ahead—that’s what it takes. Nothing less than our full, conscious attention. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. I say, let’s do it. As ever, y’r friend, –Steve

Technorati Tags: peoples of the book,mud,walking in mud,boat mooring,consciousness,engagement,Occupy,Arab Spring,education,two kinds of people

Reflection 260: Divided Attention

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

The morning of March 20th began as I had hoped. The sun rose brilliantly from low clouds out over the ocean. I was with a group of friends conducting our annual vigil on the equinox to mark the divide between the winter and spring of our souls.

But from that high point, I have never gotten my act together as coherently as the signs that day seemed to indicate I would. The American spring of 2012 has turned out to be far busier and more complicated than I imagined. So much to do; so little time. In late March, my son Ken and I built a new ramp for the boathouse so I could get my boat in the water and row to the island where I knew stillness awaited me so I could work on this blog. But April has come and gone without that happening.

Last evening, I and two others spoke briefly before the Bar Harbor Town Council to prepare the way for delivery of a petition asking that body to stand with communities across America in defending democracy from the corrupting influence of corporate wealth on the electoral process. I pointed out that corporate “personhood” and money as “free speech” are metaphors, and in taking them literally, the Supreme Court has based its decisions on wishful thinking or out-and-out deception. I compared the effect of the Citizens United decision to toxic emissions wafted into the air by Midwestern industries, which Maine residents inhale at every breath, poisoning the climate in which we vote.

I find myself torn between taking action against the ills abroad in the land and tending my little blog as I would a plant in my garden. Which makes the best use of my limited energy: healing the world or healing myself?

April went by like a shot. Two hearing tests, four senior college sessions on consciousness, figuring my taxes, four Occupy general assemblies, eight meetings, a watershed conference at which I gave a presentation, PetchaKutcha Night in Waterville (another presentation), several talks, and so it went. Not that it was a lot of work, but it was different kinds of work so I kept shifting gears to keep up with myself. As the month went on, I found it harder and harder to concentrate on yet another new thing. For a week now I haven’t updated my blog. Or gotten used to the refurbished iPad I plan to use on the island to post to my blog—that is, if I can get away. I am new to iPad technology, so have yet to figure out how to use a machine that comes with minimal instructions.

Which is boring because it’s largely a matter of technical details, not substance. These days, our technology changes so radically and readily, it’s hard to keep ahead of the learning curve to maintain productivity, much less increase it. The technology of pencils and paper hasn’t changed since Thoreau took up the pencil-making trade over a century-and-a-half ago. Electronic gadgets morph into new versions every few months. For myself, I think in trying to keep up, I simply sidestep into a maze of diminishing returns. 

I am torn, trying to keep up as before, but never reaching the goals I am aiming for. Take a break, I tell myself, get away from the melee so I can rely on skills I already have without having to get stuck on square one yet again, stifling even the possibility of engagement with anything that matters.

So here I sit; how about you? Are you able to keep engaged and feel you’re moving ahead? If so, how do you do it? That’s it for today. As ever, I remain, y’r friend, –Steve

Technorati Tags: Consciousness,attention,awareness,conflicting engagements,new technology,saving the world,trying to keep up,falling behind,new iPad,technological change

Reflection 255: Titanomania

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

Everyone is fascinated, captivated, enthralled by the short, happy life of the Titanic, and the story of its maiden (and only) voyage that ended 100 years ago yesterday. Yes, this is the story of great myths, literature, drama. And underneath such symbolic treatments, it is the story of how we are called to consciousness by emergency situations.

Think of Russian sailors trapped in the hull of a sunken nuclear submarine. Think of the Apollo 13 astronauts. Think of coal miners sealed deep underground. Think of bungee jumpers, gamblers, tightrope walkers, and entrepreneurs who profit by taking personal risks. Even pornography horrifies-fascinates us in going beyond anything we can conceive of in our own erotic relationships.

By imaginatively putting ourselves in situations others have faced, we stand to learn how to conduct ourselves when our turn comes to meet the challenge of severe adversity. This is not an effort in logical planning, it is wholly intuitive in expanding our awareness of fight-or-flight opportunities. The wise take note, the careless gape and pass on. In any event, none of us can anticipate what will bring us down in the end.

From my point of view, the sinking of the Titanic illustrates the end of the supposed world order as we know it. We feel compelled to search for some survival advantage to take from the experience of others engaged in such an event. Why else are we given a capacity for consciousness other than to learn such lessons, so to apply them to our own advantage when the time comes?

What is it that arouses us in times of disaster but the disparity or discord between what we desire and what actually happens? It is in that gap that we come to consciousness to grapple with the difference between the best of times and the worst of times. We engage, that is, for the deepest of values—to survive under life-changing situations.

And in everyday life, we are aroused precisely by those extreme situations that are worse than bad or else better than good—putting us beyond the limits of our personal experience that we may transcend our own limitations and thrive under circumstances we have never known or imagined up till now.

In personal consciousness, each of us has a means for transcending our historical life experience in order to survive under the altered circumstances the future will inevitably present to us. We can either bull our way through on the basis of what we already know or believe—or we can incorporate new learning into our repertory of understanding, and so grow larger and more experienced with a greater probability of surviving in the face of unknown challenges ahead.

The sinking of the Titanic is, for each of us, a warning of what may lie before us. Intuition draws us to that incident so that we may learn from it how to cope with similar disasters in which we may be personally involved. Its fascination is not with the fate of those others, whether on the bridge or in first-class or steerage, but with our own personal fate should we ever collide with an iceberg in the North Atlantic—or the personal equivalent of such a disaster when we foolishly place our trust in the unsinkability of our first-person, singular and most precious self.

An alternative to developing such an emergency strategy is to attempt to forestall the future by building fortifications around our respective castles or installing backyard bomb shelters, accruing an arsenal of weapons, or hoarding vast stores of wealth instead of building life-enhancing and life-saving skills we can take with us wherever we go. Aleric took Rome because someone left the back gate open, rendering the city’s massive walls a monument to pride and forlorn hope.

In CONSCIOUSNESS: The BOOK, I offer the image of a helmsman steering his way through fog “by the deviance of his compass needle from his charted course. His mindfulness of that error allows him to turn the wheel to port or starboard to counter the error at each moment as he goes. In that simple image I discover the rise of William James’ stream of consciousness, what others see as successive instants of working memory, and I see as my ongoing loop of conscious engagement” (p. 129).

Consciousness is given us as such a helmsman to guide us in response to the errors we make in judging where we are in relation to where we want to be. The fate of the Titanic illustrates the folly of deliberately cruising through a field of icebergs in the North Atlantic, relying wholly on faith in our carrier’s claim to being “unsinkable,” wagering good money on that claim. It is when we surrender sound conscious judgment to others that we become unduly vulnerable ourselves. That is the Titanic’s message to generations ever after that fatal event.

Every day is Celebrate Personal Consciousness Day that we may make good use of gifts we otherwise may take for granted—with dire results.

Check out the Website I made for my book, myndloop.com, buy the book at Lulu.com, read it, and do what you can to live a long life in full awareness of your inner workings and the fixes you can get into.

Thanks for stopping by. Y’rs truly, –Steve

Technorati Tags: Titanic,the Titanic,consciousness,Apollo 13,bungee jumping,tightrope,pornography,intuition,celebrate personal consciousness day,consciousness the book

Reflection 251: Education!

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

Last week I showed a PowerPoint featuring eagles, herons, harbor seals, and sandpipers to the afternoon program at a local grammar school. All the photos of wildlife I showed had been taken within a mile of the school. I told the kids that they had the same opportunity to see what I saw if they’d get outdoors and look around. They were a great group, paid attention to every slide, and asked excellent questions.

On my way to the school, I’d seen first one great blue heron take off from the shallows along the river river, then another right behind it. Typically, great blues arrive from the southland on the first of April, but they were early this year. Driving home afterward, I saw an adult American bald eagle fly over the road just ahead of me. My message in the talk was that in order to see such sights, you have to take the initiative to look around and engage your surroundings right where you are.

The one question that really got to me (even though I didn’t field it very well when I heard it) came during the sandpiper section from a soft-spoken boy who asked, “How can you tell the difference between all those kinds of birds?” I said something to the effect that I worked at it because knowing my wild neighbors was important to me, and I’d kept my eyes open for opportunities to get to know them better. But driving home, that boy’s question stayed with me. We learn the names and characteristics of things that are important to us—things we engage with—such as tools, super heroes, makes and models of cars, brands of ice cream, TV shows, celebrities, singers, and as in my case, birds and other forms of wildlife. I engage with every bird I see, and try to get to know it by name.

I had set up a teachable moment in that boy’s mind, and, driving along, I thought about how I could come up with an answer worthy of the question. We get good at doing things we pay attention to because they matter to us. Paying attention is the key, noticing in this case how birds are similar to one another, and how they are different. And having names for the different groups we can sort them into. The trick is to build on skills the kids already have and work from there by refining and expanding that foundation. Every student in the room knew the difference between, say, a robin, a crow, and a chickadee when they saw one, though they probably hadn’t thought about how they came to know what they already knew.

That’s what I could point out to them, how they already knew how to tell a crow was a crow and not a robin or chickadee. Size mattered, color, voice, habitat, way of moving on the ground and in the air, what they ate, who eats them, where commonly seen. Once they had grasped that, they could make a list of things they’d like to know about a bird to be able to identify it. They could move on to other common birds in the vicinity, and then to ones they saw only occasionally, like migrating warblers and hawks. Then they could pore through bird guides that set down the kinds of things we want to know in systematic order, and the kids could come to understand that order so they could make easy use of it.

I telephoned the woman who’d set up the afterschool program, and asked if we could have a follow-up session to address the question of how to provide a framework that would help kids learn more about birds on their own. She thought that was a great idea, and would speak to school administrators about how we might fit it into the schedule. Or if not that, how we could cover it in the summer camp offered by a local nonprofit. The wheels are turning, trying to build on a challenge a particular student wanted addressed.

That, to me, is how true education takes place. Adults rising to the occasion of addressing issues that students feel are important. Which requires teachers to listen to students and not strictly vice versa. Learning is a matter of give-and-take, making educated guesses, learning what the possibilities are, trial and error in the field, with as much practice as you’re willing to put into studying a guidebook and watching birds.

We learn about situations we get ourselves into, and in which we want to do better the next time. Enjoying the effort as a kind of adventure helps us improve our skills over time. Which is very different from completing homework that others assign to us. It’s the homework and fieldwork we assign to ourselves that really matters. If we want to get good at identifying birds, we first have to set that as our goal, then carry out projects and exercises that help us grow into the skills we want to learn.

If we want to learn how to use chopsticks, we have to be willing to work at learning that skill by actually eating—poorly at first—with chopsticks. It helps to eat food that comes in small chunks suited to being levered into our mouths. Learning to feed ourselves has strong survival value, so we’ll eventually catch on, particularly when we see others modeling the skills we’d like to get good at. In learning to play the guitar, it helps to admire those who can play the kind of music that we like.

In learning new skills, motivation is essential, close observation of others performing those skills, willingness to practice, and patience in keeping at it until our skills match theirs. Slowly, we grow into the person we’d like to become. That is, we make ourselves happen as who we’d like to be.

Self-transcendence is driven by urges inside every one of us, different in each case. The lives we create for ourselves are proof of the effort we put into being who we are moment-by-moment. Being the person others want us to be is a form of service to them. Being who we want to become fulfills the most basic freedom we are born to. We didn’t ask to be born, so can only rise to the the occasion of our birth by setting goals worthy of our human potential.

The job of educators, as I see it, is to engage with their students very closely in order to support their setting worthy life goals and choosing projects to enhance their development while, at the same time, making sure they explore the full range of their options, and become aware of possible dangers and limitations. Then to speed them on the course they set for themselves—and get out of their way.

Learning is always personal and experiential. Teachers can promote and encourage the process, but they cannot deliver it to their students via books, lectures, videos, or presentations. Teachers can be guides and models, but not passers-on or imparters of wisdom. Experience is something we reach-for and live, not get as a gift. When I was in basic training, my sergeants did their best to turn me into a killer, and I gave them an A for making the effort—but they failed. They set me up to poke my bayonet into a straw dummy while yelling, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” but I recognized the exercise as metaphorical and that I was only going through the motions. I became a still photographer in the Signal Corps and spent my days lugging a camera, not a rifle, which was the best use the Army could have made of the skills I brought with me when I was drafted.

Education by command, authority, and fear is always a failure because it entails mind control, not learning. If any vestige of understanding is achieved, it is only a thin layer that will quickly rub off. I think of all the capitals I memorized in school, the national imports and exports of every country in South America, the Presidents in serial order, the differential equations. Now gone with the wind. Since getting my first camera for a box top and a quarter when I was four, I have worked at developing my visual skills, and made a living at it. Now that kind of film photography hardly exists any longer, so I’ve had to go digital, which I’ve done on my own.

Self-directed learning always morphs into the next big challenge, and the challenge after that because we keep growing into new versions of our selves until we die. Lifelong learning is directed by our self-governing loops of engagement. Those loops serve as our primary means for following our bliss. Once we figure out what resources are available, and how to make use of them, we can learn anything we put our minds to. We don’t need teachers, schools, or colleges; we simply live our own lives.

That’s my second take on the grand topic of education. I’ve barely scratched the surface, but the essence of my argument is that schools need to teach to the inner student, not the external demands of a society built to satisfy the views of a ruling elite.

Thanks for listening. And for being yourself to the hilt. –Steve

Technorati Tags: Consciousness,Consciousness studies,introspection,education,lifelong learning,thoughts,reflections,learning,self-teaching

Reflection 247: For once, then, …

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

This just in from 75 years ago: I am climbing the back stairs from the kitchen in the dark and, as I go, my father hails me as “Steffan, Stepanovich, Steffanovsky,” which I take as a term of endearment, though I wouldn’t have known at the time what a term of endearment was. I have no idea where it arose in my father’s experience. What I felt then, and know now, was that he was applying those exotic names to me. This from a man not given to voicing his affections, so I have clung to those vocal rhythms all these years.

Just as defeats and interruptions kindle consciousness, so do intimacies, endearments, and tender tokens of positive regard at the opposite pole of experience. What affirms us or upsets us—we remember because we are moved one way or the other. Moved in the sense of synapses being built up, forging our identities and places in the world.

The phrase, “for once, then, something,” springs to mind from Robert Frost’s poem of that name. He was describing the experience of peering into a deep well, and sensing something white gleaming beneath the surface of the water. But then a drop fell from a fern and rippled the surface, blotting out what had drawn his attention. “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.”

Just as that shining at the bottom of a well became part of Frost’s lifelong heritage of experience, so did “Steffan, Stepanovich, Steffanovsky” become a formative part of mine. Each of us is assembled synapse by synapse, item by item, moment by moment, experience by experience, to become the person we are today walking around in our separate worlds, interrelating, forming a world of humanity on a particular planet in space.

What if my genome had been assembled in, say, Russia? I would now speak Russian, have Russian experiences and memories, sing Russian songs, eat Russian food, and be wholly different from my historically American self. What if my genome had been assembled in Afghanistan? Tanzania? North Korea? Djibouti? My shimmering experiences would have been different, and my unique self would be other than I find myself today. My world view would be different. As each of us is different from every other person on Earth.

I here offer “for once, then, something” as a key to how we become who we are. We do not open our eyes and ears onto the world so much as into the world as we seize it and codify it in the confines of our personal histories of experience. We are assemblies of gleaming bits of hurt and wonder that stick with us because they shape our brains, sensitizing us to be on the lookout for more of the same. We make our worlds as we go, adding increasing amounts of detail to this experience and to that.

At some point, many of us stop adding to our stores of experience and become set in our outlooks and ways, products of the lives we have lived. A few others keep adding to their collections of formative experiences, their understanding expanding with age—always from the perspective of one privileged or condemned to live just such a life.

The upshot being that each of us lives in a country of his or her own making, a world apart from all others, and to reach across the spaces between us requires more skill and effort than we commonly assume. What we are able to make of our individual histories determines our fitness for survival in our unique territories and situations.

How we engage one another is up to us, how we reach out to and receive one another—with openness and anticipation in gratefulness we are both present to this moment, or fearful suspicion and hostility, perhaps leading us to shoot one another down in the street. 

The point of all this is that until we truly know ourselves, we cannot know anyone else because our hidden self gets in the way of every engagement, and we project our unique understanding of the world onto the world itself, convinced we know the world as it is, while, in truth, we only know the world as we would have it be in light of our formative experience.

That is why I have put so much of my life’s energy into writing CONSCIOUSNESS, The BOOK. I intend it as the book of you and me as we render ourselves in light of our respective experiences. If we each take responsibility for our actions as reflections of our personal histories, then we have a chance of enjoying a picnic together on the bank of the stream of experience where we meet. By claiming our sundry nuances, our “for once, then, something” moments, we appreciate the shimmering apparitions we present one to another. Which takes careful attention over an extended period of time.

The question then becomes, are we willing to take the time to get to know one another, or do we pass in the mists of everyday awareness? I invite you to check out my Website, www.myndloop.com, to explore a few of the issues I think are involved in meeting face-to-face, eye-to-eye.

Thanks for reading this far. I remain, y’rs, –Steve