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

 

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Reflection 248: Haiku Again

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at haiku as tokens of human consciousness, so I thought I’d revisit them now that I’ve finished my book. The idea being that I can’t imagine a more succinct expression of what’s going on in someone’s mind on a particular occasion than what they jot down in those few syllables. I don’t mean the formulaic, 5-7-5 kind we teach kids in grade school to make them into little poets. I mean haiku as even grownups put their hearts and souls into them as a worthy means of capturing particular insights in a medium that lasts about as long as the insight itself.

As Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) wrote them in Japan, haiku were a forerunner of tweets in being a means of capturing impressions while away from home, getting just enough down on paper to kindle memories that could later be shared with others. It’s tricky translating haiku from the Japanese, not only because the syntax differs from English (with verbs coming at the end of a sentence), but as Harold G. Henderson points out, there aren’t any articles (a, an, the), pronouns (he, she, they), distinctions between singular and plural, or marks of punctuation. Which often get added in translation to make them acceptable to ears used to hearing English. Instead of punctuation marks, Japanese haiku include kireji, words that serve as a kind of stage direction regarding emphasis and rhythm to be read aloud without adding meaning to the text.

In his An Introduction to Haiku (Doubleday Anchor, 1958), Henderson sometimes adds rhymes to the haiku he translates, but he bases his versions on literal word-for-word renderings from Japanese into English, so it is easy to get back to a crude semblance of the author’s mind at work.

1. For instance, here is one haiku in a) Japanese, b) literal English translation, c) Henderson’s, and d) my rendition.

a) Shizu-no | ko | ine-suri-kakete | tsuki | wo | miru

b) Poverty’s child | rice-grind-starting | moon | at | looks

c) Poverty’s child— / he starts to grind the rice, / and gazes at the moon.

d) farmer’s child / grinding rice / looks to the moon

As a depiction of basho’s conscious experience, this is a highly compressed and economical presentation of a scene the poet saw on his travels in which a sensory impression of a boy in a field was categorized (interpreted or conceptualized) as “poverty’s child.” The situation drawn to our attention is that the boy does not look at what he is doing, but at the moon, a contrast that rouses the poet to take notice because it conveys the boy’s feeling of reluctance or isolation while performing this particular task. That feeling is not stated in so many words, but is conveyed by the two-fold action at the heart of the poem—the grinding while looking at the moon.

2. Here’s another example (all of these are by Basho).

a) Kare-eda | ni | karasu-no | tomari-keri | aki-no-kure

b) Withered-branch | on | crow’s | settling-keri | autumn- nightfall

c) On a withered branch / a crow has settled— / autumn nightfall.

d) lone crow / on a withered branch / autumn nightfall

In Japanese and Henderson’s English, the branch comes first, then the crow, that combination setting us up for consummation with the mood affirmed by “autumn nightfall.” The image is all of a piece, the coming of night paralleling and affirming the crow on its branch. In this example there is an affinity between branch and crow that draws our attention, not a contrast as in the first poem. Our feelings can be bivalent, either attracting or distracting our conscious attention. In this example it is the coherence of the entire image that moves and confirms our experience. In d) I switched the order in which crow and branch appear in this scene to avoid the awkward (to my ears) Japanese construction placing the verb after the subject after the direct object, wrecking in the process Basho’s comparison between crow and night as both descending. The poetry lies in the sound and rhythm of the original Japanese, which is lost in translation.

3. Here’s Basho’s most famous haiku, considered a breakthrough in 1686:

a) Furu-ike | ya | kawazu | tobi-komu | mizu-no-oto

b) Old-pond | : | frog | jump-in | water-sound

c) Old pond— / and a frog-jump in / water-sound

d) old pond / frog leaps / “blip”

According to Henderson, the story is that Basho was sitting with friends in his garden when, during the stillness, they all heard the sound of a frog diving into water. Basho quickly gave out the last two parts of a tripartite haiku; the challenge was to find a suitable first part, which Basho after some discussion, settled on. The pond would not have been uppermost in the group’s consciousness, nor the visual frog. It was the sound the frog made hitting the water that caught their attention, as novelty often does. The issue became, what would be an appropriate setting for the resulting sound? To make sense of that sound, Basho placed it in the context of an ancient body of water, setting the quality of long endurance against the brief and abrupt appearance of the frog (which was imagined but not seen). The pond was a body of water in the understanding; the frog was a conceptual diver-into-water; only the sound was a concrete, sensory impression. It was the surprising nature of that damp “blip” in the universe amid a conversation about other matters that created the occasion for poetry in the minds of those present. The actual writing of the haiku became part of the occasion, so the entire scene has come down to us as an integral part of the Basho legend.

4. Here’s another haiku centered on the role of rice in Japanese culture.

a) Furyu-no | hajime | ya | oku-no | ta-ue-uta

b) Refinement’s | beginning | : | “interior’s” | rice-planting-song

c) The beginning of all art: / a song when planting a rice field / in the country’s inmost part.

d) art begins here / rice-planting song / in rural Japan

The song Basho heard in the northern province of oku on one of his journeys is at the heart of this haiku. He composed the verse on the spot when asked to share a poem he had written in the northern interior. He heard in the local work song the deep beginnings of the more sophisticated art of the city. The first part of the poem stemmed from his understanding of the customary transition from rural folk art to a more intricate urban treatment. He contrasted the two—song and art, country and city—and that contrast creates the tension between the two parts of the poem that gets our attention. The first part is conceptual—art had to have begun somewhere. The second is based on personal experience on his journey. The result is a larger understanding of the spatial and temporal relationship between rural and citified Japan. I ignore Henderson’s rhyme of part with art as extraneous to the haiku.

5. Here’s one based on Basho’s appreciation for the cultural history of Japan.

a) Natsu-gusa | ya | tsuwamono-demo-ga | yume-no | ato

b) Summer-grasses | : | strong-ones’ [plural] | dreams’ | afterward

c) Summer grass: / of stalwart warriors splendid dreams / the aftermath

d) summer weeds / fallen warriors’ / relict dreams

On one of his journeys, Basho came to the site of a famous medieval battle at a former castle, in his day gone to wasteland. He wept at the thought of lost glories and wrote this poem on the spot. Vegetation was all that was left of the famous story, providing the basis of the concrete sensory impression that contrasted with details his imaginative understanding provided from memory. Descended from warriors himself, Basho identified with the warriors, and felt their defeat personally. That contrast stirred his consciousness, and he compressed the disparity between then and now into this poem. Imagine compressing that history into five words! Such is the art of haiku.

6) This poem written in 1694 is one of Basho’s last.

a) Tabi | ni | yamite | yume | wa | kare-no | wo | kake-meguru

b) Journey | on | taken-ill | dreams | as-for | dried-up-fields | on | run-about

c) On a journey, ill, / and over fields all withered, dreams / go wandering still.

d) ill on a journey / delirium wanders / the withered land

At 50, still out exploring the Japanese landscape, Basho got sick and could not continue. Friends and pupils gathered to him and asked that he write a traditional “death poem” to sum up his life and beliefs. He told them that all his works since the Old Pond haiku was to be his legacy. But waking the next day after a dream, he summoned friends and followers to his bedside and he gave them this poem. Somewhat similar to the preceding poem about warrior’s dreams, Basho, understanding his nearness to death, relates his condition to his surroundings, and leaves his dreams (poems and pupils) to carry on in his stead. Dreams are a vital dimension of consciousness, and take us to realms we cannot reach by conventional means. Unspoken here, we are left to imagine the images Basho entertained on one of his last nights.

I have more Basho haiku to share with you, but I’ll get to them in a following post. My point here is that the world we truly live in is inside us in the felt-depths of our consciousness. When we die, all trace of that lived consciousness disappears, leaving our families, friends, and descendants to continue our journeys in their own way. It is highly unlikely that anyone would be able to recreate our unique awareness from the works, notes, and scraps we leave behind, for no collection of physical objects can capture the essence of a living being. But if we read between the lines that a singular consciousness has left us, we can attempt to construe what it was like to live a particular life. I am personally drawn to Matsuo Basho as an example of what can be captured through supreme skill, effort and economy. I see his legacy as a gift to those who choose to accept it. 

Basho made a point of engaging the land of his day through his travels and teaching. His loop of engagement was extremely active and discerning to the end. He used horseback technology, language, and little else in leaving us a portrait of one man’s sensibility and loop of engagement in his day.

Technorati Tags: consciousness,consciousness studies,reflections,thoughts,mindfulness,introspection,first-person investigation,know thyself,haiku,Matsuo Basho,Basho,Harold G. Henderson

Reflection 243: Self-Reinvention

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

Every morning when I wake up, I have to reinvent myself in conformity with whom I thought I was when I went to bed last night. I use a variety of tricks to help me gain a sense of continuity in my life.

This morning, for instance, I awoke from a particularly intense dream in which I was lost and couldn’t find my way back. In my wanderings along gusty city streets I came across men working on a flimsy scaffold suspended from the roof of a building. I watched as the wind seized the scaffolding and floated it free of the building, hurling it into the street blocks away, where the workers’ blood splattered the pavement.

There was much more to the dream, which I vividly remembered, so I lay in bed replaying what I could recall of my adventures. Then I got up and gradually shifted from my nighttime to my daytime self, which I found to be hard work because I was still in my dream. Ah, I discovered my socks and shoes more-or-less where they should be; that was a good sign. And my boots. The pruning shears I had gotten ready last fall and hadn’t used in five months. On my table I discovered several notes to myself about what I wanted to work on today. I didn’t remember writing them, but there they were so I could set my sights by them in picking up where I’d left off when I went to bed.

Out of habit, I bent down to inspect the kitchen floor for ants, which I’ve been feeding all winter. My strainer was in the drying rack next to the sink where I’d rinsed it after scrubbing five pounds of potatoes. The scene in the kitchen looked vaguely familiar, and I reaffirmed the connection I’d had with that room yesterday. Slowly, I began to make breakfast, filling the kettle, heating water, taking a mug off the shelf.

Gradually, I headed into the day—clinging to dream fragments all the while. The crib notes I’d left on the table scrawled on the back of an envelope reminded me that this was the day I was to attend a joint meeting of the Ellsworth and Mount Desert Island Occupy groups for training in group process and consensus building. I was to redo my senior college schedule, call the local newspaper, proofread a draft watershed handbook, make an appointment with an audiologist, and so on. Slowly, slowly I began to feel like myself as traces of the dream receded.

This illustrates what it takes every morning to crank up my loop of engagement so I achieve a sense of continuity in my life and coherence in mapping out my day in more-or-less orderly fashion. Every day I am faced with the challenge of reinventing myself so I appear familiar to myself and know who I am. If a tsunami had struck in the night and the world I woke to was topsy-turvy, I would be an entirely different person without shoes, boots, notes or relevant thoughts. I would be distressed because I wouldn’t have a sense where I was or what to do.

I still remember the day my three-year-old son pulled the handle of a pan on the stove, tipping a stream of boiling water down the length of his left arm. My fingers just wouldn’t dial the phone as if they’d never done it before. I shook all over, and had to force my fingers into the little dial holes until I got the numbers in the right sequence. Once in Eastern Washington State when I was heading off into the bush to urinate, a rattlesnake slid across my path—abruptly the urgency left me and I didn’t have to go any more but turned on my heels and got out of there.

If getting married, building a house, finding a new job, getting into a new school, all require a strong and enduring engagement with what is relevant to such matters, think of the havoc that getting divorced wreaks on that commitment, or moving out of a house, being fired, or having a baby in tenth grade, or kicked out of school. In such instances we have to invent ourselves anew, taking on entirely new identities because our drives and values have been proven no match for the lives we actually lead.

When a loved one dies, we are left behind to suffer the loss, not just for a day or a week, but forever—the rest of our days. When a woman I know was in her eighties, she had a blood clot that moved from her hand to her heart, her lungs, and her kidneys. Her children wouldn’t let her go because they had lived with her for their entire lives and couldn’t imagine life without their mother. So the woman had quadruple-bypass surgery, was on dialysis and oxygen for a year, and lay in bed building up debts she lacked the money to pay until her body called it quits on its own because her children couldn’t let go of an engagement that was fundamental to their most basic identities.

Whether dreams or major events in the course of our lives, our engagements in life are not frills; they are fundamental to our sense of identity and well-being. They define us and make us familiar to ourselves so, as long as they continue, we know who we are. The tools and accessories we employ in maintaining those loops—breast implants, good looks, hair color, muscle strength, cars, homes, clothing, vocabularies, professions, medications and all the rest—become valued possessions in enabling us to be who we dream of being, and we defend such possessions because our personhood depends on them.

Until the tsunami rolls in, the earthquake or mudslide takes our home, the tornado strips us of every possession—and we are left to fend for ourselves with only two bare hands to use in clawing for our survival.

All that was clear to me this morning when I groggily reinvented myself in the wake of nothing but a dream. Imagine what Syrian rebels are going through these long days, the people of Greece, Mexican immigrants without passports in Arizona, people whose homes are being foreclosed in every state, pre-tsunami residents of northeastern Japan, Palestinian refugees from so-called Israel, and quake victims still without housing in Haiti. My car almost died when its timing belt frayed last year. Think what you face when your fundamental engagements in life shred to a full stop and your perceptions and actions become wholly disjointed and nonfunctional.

What can we do but be grateful for what we have? And not crave more than we need to get by with grace?

That’s my thought for today. More later. Y’r friend, –Steve

Reflection 197: Backing Off

(Copyright © 2010)

Do we have it in us? Can we back off from our project of building a future for ourselves, leaving room for those around us who are doing the same? Are we so dedicated to our agenda that we can’t appreciate that others are pursuing needs of their own? Who is to declare us right and them wrong? I mean, who aside from ourselves?

The trouble with sticking to corporate agendas with excessive zeal is that it sucks the air out of the room, leaving no oxygen for others to breathe. Is that our goal in life, to assert ourselves to the point that others suffocate in our presence? Are we capable of giving them leeway, some space to breathe? Just enough so they are comfortable in our presence, and vice versa. Are Israelis capable of backing off the Palestinians’ case, allowing them to live on their own without Israeli supervision to make sure they don’t step out of bounds?

The only way Israelis will ever live in peace is to permit Palestinians to do likewise without interference. Not just permit, insist that is their right. Instead of governing by domination, it would be better to step back, adopt a sensible two-state solution, and recognize that sovereignty for one group is workable only if all groups have equal claims to freedom and justice. As it is, Israelis regard Palestinians conceptually, as if they existed in a vacuum—but the vacuum is an emptiness in Israeli imagination.

Why is “the other” so difficult to picture in the mind? We know why the Palestinians are angry, the Israelis took their homeland out from under them by violent means. The Israelis are angry because Palestinians are blocking their agenda, coming between a people and their dream. In some ways, the Israeli dream is similar to the Palestinian dream—to live in peace. Israelis go further and insist on occupying the particular ground that they lost two millennia ago. If the Israelis were to back off, they might discover that both sides want the same thing in modern times. Which would seem to elevate the two-state solution to the level of a win-win compromise. True, neither would take possession of the entire state, but both could have access to it on peaceful terms. Is not living at peace with one’s neighbors preferable to dying an extremist’s death for an unjust cause that is wholly self-serving, and wrongly so?

Passion does not render miscategorizations accurate or fair. Insistence does not transform a claim into a right. Often the wise are those waiting patiently for their opponents to come to terms on their own without being forced. Such a strategy allows those on the opposite side to catch themselves overreaching so that, as in jujitsu, it is they who are shown to be off-balance. Extremists overreach themselves in denying the integrity of those they miscategorize or misjudge. Like hornets, they stir up commotions and alarms to snuff out the slightest hint their cause is any less righteous than they claim.

As for righteousness, no one has defended it better than the Congregation of the Holy Office has protected the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. After the fact, that body was advised to categorize Copernicus’s heliocentric theory as heresy, which led to Galileo being forced in 1633 to recant evidence provided by his telescopic investigations in support of the sun’s being the center of the universe as then understood, not the Earth as scripture would have it. Categorized as a heretic, Galileo was placed under permanent house arrest as a threat to the faith. Which is pretty much how Israel treats Palestinians today, categorizing them as threats to the state, so shutting them behind walls of concrete to teach them their place in the Israeli scheme of things.

Undue vehemence in support of particular categorizations of how things stand—or should stand—in the world is rampant around the globe. It comes as a shock to realize that bigotry on behalf of extreme beliefs is not a thing of the past. Bigotry divides people into two classes: those who are with us and those opposed; those who are right and those who are wrong. With the subtext that the right have truth and justice on their side, so are fully justified in censoring the free speech of the wrong by categorizing it as vicious and unfounded lies. That is, one effective way to guard against defamation is to defame your opponent before he is able to frame the debate. Which illustrates the power of our deliberate and conscious minds to use categorization in identifying and destroying at one blow those who oppose us.

Such tactics have become the American way. Consider these examples. 1) Political parties don’t lose elections anymore, they have them stolen by unscrupulous opponents. 2) Once corporations were categorized as persons, they were deemed to have freedom of speech under the First Amendment, which was stretched by activist judges to include the spending of money as a form of free speech—by lining those ducks in a row, the judicial branch singlehandedly undid our representative form of government as described in the U.S. Constitution. 3) Raise the issue of gun control within hearing of the National Rifle Association and you will trigger a tirade by CEO Wayne LaPierre in which absolute heresy is too weak a term for what you are are trying to say (“bullshit” would be his term); instantly you find yourself characterized as an evil terrorist out to prevent decent women and children from defending themselves with firearms, as (he will claim) specifically provided for in the Second Amendment.

Then there is AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee), the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., which claims to level the playing field for all discussions concerning Israel—but comes at such discussions from so aggressive an angle as to tilt the field smartly in its favor. For AIPAC, history is destiny, and modern Israel is seen as “fulfilling a political and historical imperative,” an imperative that makes no mention of Palestine or Palestinians, a place and a people wholly eliminated from the Jewish dream of founding a homeland in modern times. Which raises the issue, when dreams are turned to reality, what happens to those excluded from the dream? Does it matter? In this case, evidently, but not to the dreamers.

My point in this post is that in building a future for ourselves, we all attempt to reify or actualize dreams based on our prior experience, or sacred texts (as in the First and Second Amendments, or the Torah). First we visualize and categorize the kind of future we want for ourselves, then we develop the project of fulfilling our dreams as apt categorizations of reality. That, basically, is how consciousness works in the interest of our individual survival as far as we can push it.

But in realizing our dreams, it is better to include the world in its living diversity, not solely the narrow territory of our personal yearnings as we would project them onto a barren globe. If we don’t work with the lay of the land and the tribes that occupy it, we are apt to impose ourselves roughly in their midst, as Hitler did in Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, North Africa, and the Balkans during World War II. And as the Jews did in 1948—and are still doing today—in what for a time was known as Palestine, and long before that was shown on maps of the time as Egypt, Syria, Canaan, Israel, Philistia, Judah, Persia, Palestina, Jerusalem, Galilee, among other fleeting categorizations.

Given the complexity of human movements and settlements around the Earth, staking a dream claim to any particular area requires a clarity of vision far beyond what the human mind can consciously attain. Columbus claimed the so-called New World as a province of the Old, in one gesture sweeping away the sovereign relationship Native Americans had with the land they lived on. The result is that such campaigns to claim and categorize a place invariably do violence to the historical record, and are conveniently based on the limited views of a small group of assertive people in one place at one time. Such as the Bush administration in deciding to bomb Afghanistan and invade Iraq. Knowing that, as we all must by now, we are well advised to be cautious in mapping ourselves onto Earth’s living surface. At the very least we must allow for those who are already there, since forcing ourselves upon them is bound to lead to resentment and cycles of revenge for the foreseeable future.

It makes more sense to back off from our dreams and develop a live and let-live philosophy that takes other perspectives with other histories into account. Those of us alive today are latecomers to our planet. We may think of ourselves as Adam and Eve in some nouveau Garden of Eden, but the fact is wherever we go, Earth is one giant midden heap consisting of the decomposing ruins of all that has come before us in this place. Excavating for a subway tunnel, we will come across a forgotten palace or perhaps the bones of a saber-toothed tiger. Future excavators will likely dig up the refrigerator we leave at curbside today.

If our minds are so preoccupied they can’t see that each of us is but one point of light in a coruscating multitude, then we are not fully conscious, and our categorizations are apt to be wildly inaccurate because our outreach and intelligence are seriously flawed. Acting as if our judgment were infallible, we head straight for the nearest cliff. Actions we accept on faith to be true and just will surely turn out to be false, unfair, and cruel. To others as well as ourselves and our heirs. Leaving us stunned with massive internal injuries. What we need is largeness of mind from the start, not as a sorry afterthought. The way to achieve that is to resist mapping our personal meanings onto others without consulting them first; just because we can paint them as we see them doesn’t mean a casual sketch is as good as a studied rendition. Our well-intentioned categorizations represent things only as we view them at the time, not as they are. As a rule of thumb, it is safe to assume we haven’t a clue about most things most of the time, and that we know not whereof we rave and rant.

It is better if we do not insist on pushing our agenda to its foregone conclusion. That is, instead of committing to a plan of action, if we back off after our first move and wait to see what will happen. Embarking on a looping engagement with those around us, we remain open to an easy give-and-take with the situation as it develops. We are wise to see what happens before acting again. Consciousness can come to a decision in a fraction of a second, but reacting at that rate, we base the future largely on assumptions we can’t rightly make at that speed. Even after a day or a month, we can’t know very much about conducting ourselves in the world. It takes decades to develop a sense of who we are and what we’re doing—I’d say fifty years at a minimum. Until then, we have only a weak sense of what we don’t know we don’t know. If you are impulsive and can’t wait, then plunge ahead; I promise you’ll learn something new—or will if you keep an open mind.

As it is, Republicans in Congress don’t seem very keen on new learning at this stage of their development. They’re right up there with the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, which hasn’t learned much in 2,000 years of rigid, top-down, authoritarian, paternalistic organization. Nor have AIPAC and the NRA much to show for all the stands they’ve taken because, like Alois Ratzinger (a.k.a. Benedict XVI), they claim infallibility in being so headstrong they can’t learn anything they don’t already know. These are not people you can trust to usher in the future of the world because they are so busily defending their corporate points of view.

“Catholic” means including or concerning all humankind (AHD). Which would seem to require broad sensitivity to grassroots affairs, not a heavy-handed, authoritarian approach radiating top-down from an infallible apex of one man. But once an idea germinates in human consciousness and becomes institutionalized, then it ceases to develop and ossifies as if, like commandments, it is written in stone. The same fate hardens interpretations of constitutional amendments, homelands depicted in ancient scripture, platforms of political parties, colonial attitudes toward native peoples. Like ants in amber, ideas get embedded into agendas and serve as mission statements chartered by law.

I have repeatedly emphasized in this blog that consciousness is a property of individual persons, not corporate bodies. When regarded as if groupthink were the equivalent of personal consciousness, then the weight of collective thought becomes extremely dangerous, as in the case of each of the examples I have provided in this post. When multitudes behave as if of one mind, then mob rule is inevitable. With disastrous results.

Better, we place our trust in individuals who plant flower gardens, go dancing, thrive in the presence of art, music, and poetry. And look to hikers, farmers, sailors, birdwatchers, and athletes of all sorts who move their bodies in joy, not just to win. These people are into the wonder of sensory relationships, not concepts, not what they already know. They are all on the forefront of their lives, doing their best to appreciate and respond to the sensory patterns that dance in their minds. They are likely to have a more accurate take on reality than those who force meanings upon it, who live in worlds where knowing is more important than simply being who they are. If orthodox knowledge is power, stand clear of it. Follow new patterns wherever they lead; patterns are sure signs of life. Concepts are yesterday; percepts are right now.

If you must categorize, take your time. When you don’t, you might find yourself playing the role of a particle collider that creates a vacuum to ensure unstoppable forces coming from opposite directions meet head-to-head.

Reflection 193: This Blog as Project

(Copyright © 2010)

I’ve been posting this blog since early October 2008. My original plan was to update my thinking about consciousness, which I’d first explored when writing my dissertation in 1980-1982 at Boston University’s School of Education. In the interim, I had moved to Maine from the Boston area, and revitalized my relationship with the natural world. In the process, I learned a great deal about my natural self, and about natural consciousness as opposed to the more scholarly, culturally-approved variety taught in schools. It has taken me over twenty-five years to strip academic mannerisms and bad habits from my thinking. That done, feeling human again, I took up blogging to gain a fresh perspective on consciousness, not as it is supposed to be, but as it actually reveals itself in my mind.

When I began blogging, I knew very little about how to go about it. I haven’t learned much about blogging along the way because I haven’t really been blogging. I consider myself a terrible blogger because I’m long-winded and far from topical. I don’t pick up on events in Washington so much as in my head—whatever occurs to me. Which is the point of my blog—to serve as a kind of diary for my life reflections. One post leading to another (or not leading anywhere), I follow what comes to my mind—which reveals the irrational connections and associations my mind actually makes when I sit down to write. I blog about things few others see because that is the nature of my mind in particular, and the human mind in general. Each of us abides on her own private planet.

My initial aim in blogging was to update thoughts I’d had in writing my dissertation twenty-eight years ago, but I quickly found I wasn’t in that place any more. I was more interested in discovering what I didn’t know than rehashing what I already did. Nothing is more tiresome than going over the same old ground again and again, trying to find new ways to say the same old thing. Speaking of death watches, that’s a sure sign you’re watching over your own demise. If I’m not making new discoveries every day, what’s the point of my using up Earth’s precious resources just to stay alive so I can play solitaire?

I converted this blog into a voyage of discovery, and posted whatever I found exciting and challenging at the time I sat down to write. I didn’t resort to an outline because that would imply I knew where I was going. Instead, I wanted to get wherever my series of reflections would take me, then look around to find out where I was.

That’s an apt description of how I lead my life. I’ve just finished a 70-slide PowerPoint on the 90% eelgrass dieback in Taunton Bay in 2001. It took me eight years to put it together because I used it as a vehicle of discovery—my personal spaceship headed into the future toward planet Wherever. Well, that’s just where I found myself when I opened the hatch. After reflecting on the various aspects of the dieback, and the details fit a coherent pattern, I knew I was there. Here’s what I wrote about my methodology in the abstract of my presentation at the New England Estuarine Research Society’s upcoming meeting in St. Andrews, New Brunswick:

This is not a scientific study in the traditional sense so much as an experiential exploration relying heavily on human consciousness to match its characterizations and understanding to patterns it perceives in sensory phenomena. When the balance in awareness is judged to be appropriate to the problematic situation, the resulting conclusion about the cause of the dieback is more a product of aesthetic approval of cohesiveness than rigorous statistical analysis.

Some people might say I am talking nonsense, but that’s a good example of my private planet sending signals into space to see if there’s anybody out there. Which is a pretty fair description of how we go about trying to reach people who might understand us so we feel we’re not just talking to ourselves. Otherwise, what’s the point of having tongues, teeth, and lips, and making all this noise?

Or of typing away at computers and posting blogs? What is it, exactly, the Internet allows us to do that we couldn’t do in the old days B.C.—before computers? These days we certainly do more of it faster—whatever it is. It’s whatever all those folks walking and driving along are doing with their whole minds devoted to not being where their bodies are because they’re so busy twittering or gabbing on cell phones. They’re doing what I’m doing writing this blog—living in their heads where the action is. We can’t tell the difference between physical and mental reality, so come to think that whatever crosses our minds is as real as it gets. It’s not that we’re crazy, it’s that everybody’s crazy and always has been since the first ape walked upright. We think of our personal planet as terra firma, and all those extraterrestrials from other planets are misguided pretenders, wild beasts, or infidels.

Which is pretty much the message my life has impressed upon me, and I’m trying to deal with in this blog that I’ve made the central focus of my life. I’ve got to have a little talk with myself, just between me and me. Here I am in my 193rd post trying to pull it all together as a coherent project to see what I’ve learned. That’s what life is, an opportunity to learn what’s going on, and the role I play in the process. I am none other than Peter Mark Roget determined to get his thesaurus in order as his contribution to posterity before he dies.

I just now came across a sentence I wrote at the head of a yellow pad while working on Reflection 183: Orthodox Consciousness: “We characterize situations in such a way that we relate to them by preserving our sense of self.” That way, we stay who we are, no matter what. Consciousness is all about self-preservation, about inventing a future to ensure we stay the same no matter how much our surroundings may change. A Post-it note stuck on the pad says “family, preschool, early childhood education.” That’s where we start. Exploring who I am, I keep coming across who I was as the leading character of my early life. My belly button hints at an even earlier life in the womb. Those formative months in my original matrix was the slow-motion big bang that led not only to my own conscious sense of self, but to the imaginary planet I wrap myself in as the so-called real world.

At the end of last night’s meeting, a frustrated fisherman looked like she was going to cry, then said through taut lips something to the effect, ‘I just realized that I’m the only one here trying to make a living and every one in this room is trying to keep me from doing that.’ Looking into her face, I saw her child self (in me) accusing her elder brothers (in me) of picking on the essential her (in me).

She was sending signals from her planet, which I interpreted in such a way to preserve my self-identity on my own planet. So do we relate one to another.

That’s what this blog is about, interplanetary communication. There’s no escaping it. To be heard, we all must address it—me on my planet, you on yours, Peter Mark Roget on his, Emily Dickinson on hers. The notion of “free speech” makes it sound easy—all we have to do is open our mouths and say whatever comes to mind. But if we want to count ourselves in the same solar system, there’s way more to it than that. I now see that “way more” as the point of our respectively being here with, and reaching out to, one another. Making that extra effort is the topic of this blog.

So that’s why I’m looking for a vocabulary that will allow my consciousness to speak with your consciousness. The words we inherit from our respective cultures are based on the assumption that we live in—and have equal access to—the same physical world. Which I don’t think accurately describes our true situation. If, from the outset, we don’t account for our unique personal identities and outlooks on what is real, then we will never be able to account for or address the true source of the general discord and unhappiness so rampant in what we experience of today’s world. Which makes it far easier to blame everyone other than ourselves for contributing to the problem.

We need new ways of looking at and talking about world situations from inside personal consciousness itself, not as we do now as if they were somehow external to ourselves. John Weir gave us percept language—the “you in me” and the “me in you”—to help us deal with personal relationships. That is, to create a framework for reporting on situations from our disparate perspectives. But we need a complete overhaul of the language we learned at our mother’s breast if we are to deal with people who learned other languages at other breasts. Is such a universal language of consciousness possible? Having come this far in 193 posts, I believe it is. For starters, here are thirty-seven words I have tried (or intended) to use meaningfully in this blog:

1. Attention—the act of reaching out with full awareness
2. Arousal—one’s level of biological excitation
3. Expectancy—the view ahead of what might happen
4. Action—engaging the world, the upshot of consciousness
5. Acting in the world—an ongoing sequence of action
6. Making ourselves happen—inventing the future
7. Engagement—a flow of behavioral give and sensory take
8. Loop of Engagement—acting and perceiving in the now
9. Planning—figuring how to reach a desired goal
10. Perception—the parade of patterns in sensory awareness
11. Salience—the quality of being noticeable
12. Perspective—one’s outlook within a particular situation
13. Memory—residue of living a life
14. Conceptual memory—ideas useful in many situations
15. Episodic memory—mental replay of life-changing events
16. Categorization—fitting concepts to percepts, & vice versa
17. Integrity—Consciousness as a functional system
18. Coherence—All of consciousness working together
19. Judgment—what seems appropriate in a given situation
20. Intentionality—habitual categorizations
21. Meaning—achieving parity of percept with concept
22. Idiom of being in the world—system of cultural belief
23. Self—seat of biological values; the basic unit of survival
24. Values—sex, food, sleep, health, shelter, safety, etc.
25. Valence—positive, negative, or neutral regard
26. Reflexive consciousness—introspection
27. Assumption—unexamined belief
28. Attitude—bias or emotional coloring of behavior
29. Dream—consciousness without action or perception
30. Aesthetic—whole consciousness in all its parts
31. Emotion—hormonal coloring of awareness
32. Feeling—self-awareness of attitude
33. Motivation—driving urge to deliberate action
34. Project—consciousness dedicated to achieving a goal
35. Situation—an occasion for active consciousness
36. Culture—the fitting of individuals to their surroundings
37. Future-building—the point of consciousness

If there were to be a final exam for this blog, it might consist of identifying instances in which a few such terms are found to be meaningful to or relevant in your own inner life. That would be a test of the usefulness of what I have been blogging about. If they—such terms—are not applicable to your case, then I have been writing more for myself than for you. Leaving you free, as always, to create your own blog and live your own life.

I have had enough of living in a world where Israelis and Palestinians, Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor make a display of not being able to talk, work, or live with one another. Which requires me to critique the way we do business as usual in today’s world. I sincerely believe that throwing grenades, stones, or epithets at each other is a sure sign we are not taking responsibility for our own ignorance of how the world really works. My conceit is that I am onto something in writing about consciousness inside-out. Something profoundly important in providing a new perspective for viewing our relationship with a world that is unknowable in and of itself apart from our personal outlook upon it. I want fishermen and eaters of fish to be able to carry on a sensible discussion that is meaningful to both sides in more-or-less the same way. That’s why I am working on this project week by week, post after post. I thought you ought to know. Particularly if you live in somewhat the same world on a planet similar to mine.

 

Reflection 182: Intelligence

(Copyright © 2010)

I was born asking questions. That’s the kind of person I am. Still damp from the womb, I looked around and asked, “Where am I?” Then, looking at the doctor, “Who are you?” Then at my mother, “What’s for supper?” Much later, I remember riding in the back of a pickup truck from Seattle to Nespelum, Washington, asking the archaeology grad student next to me one question after another the whole way. I exhausted him well before I knew as much as I wanted to about the dig we were heading for. Inquisitive to the point of annoyment, that’s me. Is annoyment a word? Annoyance, that’s what I mean.

Asking questions is somehow related to intelligence. My American Heritage Dictionary says intelligence is “The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge,” but that’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about a mental capacity, or knowledge in general. More, as the CIA uses the word to refer to that which is known about one thing or another. But I don’t mean mere scraps of data—I mean getting the big picture: intelligence on a nontrivial scale referring to the interrelatedness of things in a particular system. In other words, building an aesthetic model in my mind of a system outside my body. Intelligence, for me, is a process of gathering experiences about relationships—how things fit and act with one another—into a coherent picture in the mind. Excuse me, in my mind. That’s the only mind I have access to or can talk knowingly about, or expand by asking further questions.

Intelligence tests claim to measure a human capacity—as if learning is independent of interest, curiosity, subject matter, or personal experience. That usage suggests a person is equally intelligent regarding anything that can be known, that intelligence is some kind of virtue or trait, which I don’t think is true. There’s no such thing as an intelligent person; there are only people who know a lot about a small number of things in relation to one another—and little about everything else. An evening spent playing Trivial Pursuit should tell us that much, at least. I’ll give you an example from my personal experience.

I’ve been studying Taunton Bay, an estuary in Maine, for a number of years. I would have said I was checking it from an inquiring point of view because it interested me, but in hindsight I see I was paying attention to it every chance I got, so I guess I really was studying it, expanding my experience of the bay holistically without reference to “information” or “data.” That way, I slowly built up an understanding of some of the workings of the bay in my head, which collectively added to “intelligence” about the bay as a  biological system. This is related to this is connected to this is tied-in with this is balanced with this. Building to a broad, qualitative under-standing of what is going on in one place in Maine. That’s what I mean by intelligence. I didn’t learn about other bays because each one is different and I wasn’t—my body wasn’t—there. And I didn’t learn about bays in general because my acquaintance was up-close and personal. Let me illustrate my wordy illustration of aesthetic intelligence by showing a picture suggesting the relationships between blue mussels and eight other aspects of Taunton Bay.

That’s a picture of a small portion of my aesthetic—of my coherent intelligence about the bay. Blue mussels are connected to sea stars (which eat them), to eelgrass (which shares their habitats), to Canada geese (which eat eelgrass), to diving ducks (such as common goldeneyes which eat mussels), to eagles (which eat goldeneyes), to marine worms (which eat food particles that mussels discard), to hunters (who shoot mussel-eating ducks), to horseshoe crabs (which mussels often attach themselves to), and to human (who harvest mussels by diving, dragging, or hand-raking). They are also connected to me because I take pictures of them in relation to other features of Taunton Bay.

That’s a snapshot of what I mean by big-picture intelligence. Getting things together in my mind to reveal their relationships and interactions. In a very real sense, that is a portrait of one corner of my conscious mind. Which is the real topic of this blog: getting my mind together about consciousness. Since reading books by Gerald M. Edelman about human con-sciousness, wrestling with his theoretical ideas, my under-standing of my own conscious processes has made a quantum leap to the next higher level. After slogging through one post after another, Edelman helped tie things together for me—at least as I interpret his writings. So today I want to write about my experience of consciousness as a whole, not just this aspect or that.

My big learning up to now is that understanding is a matter of developing an aesthetic sense of how things go together in relationship. That’s actually what the word consciousness means. Con- refers to a collective joining-together, sciousness (as in science) refers to splitting things apart into particles or elements—that is, discernment of relationships, which is commonly called knowledge. Taking splintered parts together in relationship produces consciousness—the “withness” of all aspects of mind. In this case, the withness of the different sensory arrays spread throughout the sensory brain, which Gerald M. Edelman and other neuroscientists refer to as “maps.” The parts of the brain devoted to vision contain some thirty or forty such maps, each tracking two-dimensional relationships in one aspect of visual perception—movement, color, location, direction, texture, and so on. Consciousness, then, consists of mapping events in the brain in ever-changing relationship to one another, creating an overall sense of the dynamics of the current situation.

Think of the George Gibson Quartet—guitar, organ, saxophone, percussion—in aesthetic relation to one another, or a cut by the Henry Threadgill Sextet in the 1970s. Or the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing Berlioz’ Symphony Fantastique. Or the Boston Red Sox when they get their act together and each player gives his all in exquisite relationship to the others. Or all the parts of Picasso’s Guernica telling the story of the Nazi bombing of a small town in the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War. Which is not unlike Albert Einstein spending his last days in search of a unified theory of everything that would tell the story of the universe. Many scientists, mathematicians, and theologians engage in similar quests having spiritual overtones in relating the individual mind to the larger whole as they picture it. On a more mundane level, aesthetic coherence is what a chef strives for in balancing the flavors, textures, color, and nutrients in his soup of the day. Or me in my peapod rowing across Taunton Bay at low tide, trying to fit everything I see into a coherent appreciation of what’s going on at that time in that place.

The point of the exercise being, then, to act appropriately in the situation we are engaged with as we discern its different parts and assemble them in consciousness as a coherent life event. If we can do that, then we derive a survival advantage from understanding what’s going on around us compared to others acting out of a less nuanced understanding. It’s always an aesthetic judgment call based on how we see aspects of the situation fitting together into a coherent unity—or not, as in the 2000 presidential election, the Haitian earthquake, or the global instability of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Regarding consciousness, what are the parts I am talking about? Sensory perception as annotated by memory of concepts and prior experiences. Attention, salience, and expectancy reflecting personal or biological values, motives, and interests. A sense of oneself, with feelings, hopes, fears, anxieties, pains, pleasures, and ethical preferences. Judgment of how to weigh each part, what to emphasize, what to leave out. The valance or attractiveness of one option for action compared to others. What the larger culture would recommend through the medium of tradition, habit, training, or instruction. Ongoing categorizations and interpretations modeling a scenario of the current situation as it is likely to develop in the future. These and other aspects coming together in consciousness, evaluated in relation one to another, fed forward to decision-making, advance planning, and execution, culminating in more-or-less decisive action in the world. And motivated attention to what the world does in response as told by the myriad maps keeping track of what’s happening from one’s situated point of view at the moment. All parts playing into the great loop of engagement coursing through our minds, constituting consciousness itself—the withness of such separate parts in coherent relationship with these and other parts in addition to those I have mentioned.

Without the ongoing governance provided by the contemporary loop of engagement between self and non-self, we are left in a state of autonomous dreaming disconnected from any adjustment imposed by culture, others, or the great world beyond. When flying blind in the sensory vacuum of dream-land, consciousness is entirely on its own, doing the best it can to find coherence based wholly on internal evidence of ongoing concerns. In dreams, we can see the separate items being shuffled again and again in a vain attempt to find the most apt relationship between them. What comes through is not the order of the world but the persistent order of the self as imposed on that world. In some circles, this counts as a spiritual more than a rational or cognitive take on events. The subject of dreams is always the same—yours truly, the dreamer, chief of operations in all matters concerning consciousness when the mysterious world has no say in the matter. That is, when all intelligence is internal, without curiosity about or regard for what might be happening in the great world of Beyond.

This, then, is a miniature portrait of consciousness as I understand it right now and write these words to post to my blog. If you ask me tomorrow, I’ll tell you something different because my mind will have moved on from where it is now. But this gives you an overview of the kinds of thoughts I have in gathering intelligence about my personal stream of con-sciousness. Here is an assessment in keeping with the aesthetic highlights of today’s line of thinking. My subsequent experience will unfold differently than ever before, and my dreams tonight will be unlike any I have had previously. Who can tell what tsunami will surge, what volcano erupt, what star explode, what earthquake turn the terra firma of my little world to heaving jelly? Stay tuned to this station for further bulletins as my mind delivers them to me.

In the meantime, to end as I began—with a question—how is it with you on your trek through the universe? Do the seconds, months, and decades of your mental journey add to a larger whole? Whatever your experience, I’d be happy to receive a brief summary of what intelligence you’ve picked up along your route. I invite you to leave a comment in the space provided below.

 

Reflection 147: Steep Climb

(Copyright 2009)

Both hard workers, Carole and I allow ourselves only one four-day vacation a year—when Maine summer glides into fall. These days we always seek the same destination, a small island on the coast. This year I rowed us over at high tide on a day with light winds. We unloaded our gear where we could get onto the rocks, then I moored the boat in a small, sheltered cove. Trouble was, the tide was so high, I couldn’t get out of the cove by walking along the shore past cliffs and branches reaching over the water. The only route was up the steep wooded bank at the back of the cove. So up I went on all fours, grabbing a limb here, bracing my knee there, willing my body to rise vertically through a tangle of sharp branches lusting after my flesh. Calculating each move, watching for sticks aimed at my eyes, I fitted myself to the terrain as if it had grown up around me. Though I didn’t belong there, I made as if these were my native haunts. The logic of the place sank in, and by the time I got to the top of the bank, I was an old hand. Four nights later, I had this dream:

I am at a gathering of college alumni. I recognize a lot of people, but don’t really fit in that scene. Everyone seems stuck in his ways. Feeling like a stranger, I excuse myself and head down a steep flight of stairs, then walk along a gravel road, which rises steeply ahead, like the great wave in Hokusai’s view of Fuji. It is night. The pitch becomes vertical. I have no choice but to scramble among the vegetation on the side of the road, groping with my hands, grabbing stalks, bracing my feet, forcing myself upward. At the top of the rise, I am in the laboratory of a distinguished scientist, surrounded by elaborate research apparatus. He is at the end of his tether; his training has got him this far, but he can’t move ahead. I tell him he has to die to his discipline and accomplishments if he wants to get beyond them. I demonstrate what I mean by jumping into the well of a deep pit. I find myself sprawled at the bottom, among a group of my peers—those who think as I do. We lie there trading new thoughts among ourselves, wounded but alive, planning next moves.

 

Reflection 128: Woody Allen Consciousness

(Copyright © 2009)

I’ve posted about consciousness being situational in nature (Reflection 80), about the left-brain interpreter module deciding the meaning of events (Reflection 86), about idioms of consciousness providing ways of being in the world (Reflection 124), and about elixirs of consciousness adjusting “reality” to our way of thinking (Reflection 127). What I’ve not mentioned is where such activities might be seated in the brain, for if they are aspects of consciousness as I claim, that’s where their stories would necessarily begin. It strikes me that these four modes of consciousness have something in common, but I’m not sure what that something might be. This post is about my search to find out. As usual, it points to discovery through coincidence or by accident—and beyond that, to the mind revealing itself in strange ways.

My first step was to consolidate my thoughts on situations, interpreters, idioms, and elixirs in one place to make comparison easier. How to do that? I thought of a matrix laid out with the four aspects of consciousness lined up in columns and possible functional substrates listed in rows down the side. The word matrix stems from the Latin meaning a female animal used for breeding—basically, the female principle in reproductive mode. That’s just what I needed, something to stir my creativity. I listed the functions of each aspect as briefly as I could:

• Situations—provide the context or framework of consciousness
• Interpreters—develop meaningful stories or narratives accounting, rightly or wrongly, for awareness
• Idioms—are ways of being in the world according to one acquired discipline or another
• Elixirs (fudge factors)—adjust understanding to accord with fundamental beliefs in order to produce a desired effect.

Reading what I had written, I felt a jab of anxiety. What could they possibly have in common? Nothing sprang to mind. So I went on, off the top of my head listing broad functional regions of the brain where facets of consciousness might arise or at least be involved: perception, conception, memory, expectancy, feeling, planning, judging, speaking, acting, and so on. Then I took an hour to break down each of the four aspects in terms of what I knew about different functional areas of the brain. And went to bed. This on the day before my son’s birthday.

For two hours, I lie awake in the dark, wondering what to do. Basically, worrying. It all started so innocently. Days ago, I’d left a message on my son’s answering machine, asking how he’d like to celebrate his birthday. I said Carole and I would be happy to provide a floating meal to be eaten whenever and wherever he chose. If Friday didn’t work, maybe Sunday. Just give me a call. Days rolled by with no response. His birthday is tomorrow. What to do? After installing a bilge pump in my boat, I stop by my son’s workplace. It turns out both his mom and I (long divorced) are pestering him about his birthday. He’s working toward a show on Saturday and feels cornered with no place to hide. So he disappears by not taking calls. Anyway, after encouragement from his wife, my son agrees that Monday is doable. We agree to meet at the boathouse at noon. He’ll see if his brother can come. I call Carole to ask if Monday is OK with her. It is. I will bring turkey loaf, mashed potatoes, and ice cream; she’ll bring asparagus and bake a cake. So it seems settled.

Yet here I am at 2:00 in the morning, worrying how to pull it all together. Catsup. I don’t use it, so don’t have any. Buy catsup. Bring salt and pepper. How keep the turkey loaf and mashers warm while rowing across to the island, the ice cream cold? How many potatoes do I need? What if rains? With the battery for the bilge pump in place, how can I fit two other people in my boat? Where will I brace my feet without jarring the pump? And that’s only for starters. I progress to more serious anxieties, dwelling on times things hadn’t worked out in the past. I spend two hours reviewing my life—marriages, divorces, relationships. And in the back of my mind—the consciousness matrix and what it has to tell me. I run through the four aspects of consciousness, their possible placement in the brain. Everything is problematic—life is problematic. Eventually I get back to sleep.

When I woke up, I saw immediately that the four aspects of consciousness all deal with attention, arousal, and anxiety. They are all ways of putting energy into coping with stress. Situations are situations precisely because their parts are at odds, and so kindle anxiety. Our interpreter modules provide answers to questions that stir anxiety (I recall a write-up of Michael Gazzaniga’s work in which a split-brain patient begins his answer to a question about his interpretation of an experimental situation by saying, “Oh, that’s easy” or something to that effect, which I now see as compensating for anxiety). Idioms of consciousness focus attention on discrete topics, reducing anxiety by narrowing the field of concern. And elixirs of consciousness serve to deal with anxiety more than truth, as students are anxious to fulfill assignments by coming-up with right answers by hook or by crook. Shelley Smithson’s piece in the June 29, 2009 issue of The Nation, “Radioactive Revival in New Mexico,” provides this example of using God as a magic elixir to help things turn out as desired:

[Marita] Noon, . . . a Christian motivational speaker before becoming a self-proclaimed “advocate for energy,” says God put uranium in New Mexico so that Americans can wean themselves from Middle Eastern oil and Russian uranium.

Consciousness appears to be largely a means of dealing with situations in which doubt, uncertainty, and consequent anxiety predominate. The amygdala is involved in each of the aspects of consciousness I am focusing on, shaping relevant strategies for converting motivating stress into productive behavior. In The Emotional Brain (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Joseph LeDoux writes:

The amygdala is like the hub of a wheel. It receives low-level inputs from sensory-specific regions of the thalamus, higher level information from sensory-specific cortex, and still higher level (sensory independent) information about the general situation from the hippocampal formation. Through such connections, the amygdala is able to process the emotional significance of individual stimuli as well as complex situations. The amygdala is, in essence, involved in the appraisal of emotional meaning (page 168).

And it is certainly the emotionally meaningful aspects of consciousness we pay special attention to and, thanks to the hippocampus, remember. As I have said, consciousness is given us to solve novel problems, including those in a cultural, not natural, context. I have reached that conclusion the long way round, by using my late-night anxiety as a means of studying anxiety itself. Anxiety about loose ends hanging from my wish to celebrate my son’s birthday kept me awake. So anxiety was an integral part of my mind at the time.

Schools are hotbeds of anxiety. Every test, lesson, and assignment is a source of stress. Even sports fire people up, both players and spectators, all traceable to anxiety. What we learn is not content so much as how to deal with tensions that force us to learn how to proceed through difficult tasks that upset us at the time. Through exposure to various subject disciplines, we learn to cope with related life situations. We acquire the idioms educated people use to surmount their problems. We learn how to do research, how to listen, how to express ourselves, how to solve problems—how to accomplish tasks others assign to us. All based on suffering anxiety and applying techniques that diminish it.

Sitting down to write a post, I am nothing if not anxious. Usually I am anxious in a way shaped as curiosity about an issue I am involved with. But every creative endeavor starts with stage fright of one sort or another. Am I up to the task? Do I have the skill, energy, and desire to work this through? I remember Hector Berlioz writing in his autobiography about dreaming a piece of music in specific detail, but knowing how difficult it would be to ever get it performed, not writing it down. The music came to him in his sleep two nights in a row—then never again, scuttled by anxiety over the trouble it would cause later on.

When dirty dishes pile up in the sink, we become active in a constructive way—or else make ourselves scarce. These are two different ways of dealing with stress, by coping or refusing to cope at all, by fighting or fleeing—as I fled from the lady with the torn jaw and cheek on a street in London 50 years ago (see Reflection 119: Man and Dog). Our amygdalas help us decide which strategy to select. Schooling trains us to face into challenges directly. When we tire of that, we go to the movies—the funnier, the sexier and more violent, the better to distract us from our worries. We can learn from the emotional fixes we get into, or maybe get high or drunk. We can deal, or try to escape.

I heard Terry Gross interview Woody Allen on Fresh Air this week. His view is that life consists of one anxiety-producing situation after another. Each of his films deals with a different episode of the human condition as he sees it:

TERRY GROSS: So, may I ask, what are some of the real problems that making movies distracts you from?

WOODY ALLEN: Well, they distract me from the same problems that you face or that anyone faces, you know, the uncertainty of life and inevitability of aging and death, and death of loved ones, and mass killings and starvations and holocausts, and not just the manmade carnage but the existential position that you’re in, you know, being in a world where you have no idea what’s going on, why you’re here or what possible meaning your life can have and the conclusion that you come to after a while, that there is really no meaning to it, and it’s just a random, meaningless event, and these are pretty depressing thoughts. And if you spend much time thinking about them, not only can’t you resolve them, but you sit frozen in your seat. You can’t even get up to have your lunch.

So it’s better to, you know, distract yourself, and people distract themselves creatively, you know, in the arts. They distract themselves in business or by following baseball teams and worrying over batting averages and who wins the pennant, and these are all things that you do and focus on rather than sit home and worry.

Woody Allen is a good example of someone who reduces anxiety by immersing himself in his work—adopting a way of being in the world, an idiom, that he has the drive and skill to maintain while working on exactly the same types of problems that he finds so overwhelming:

WOODY ALLEN: [M]aking a movie is a great distraction from the real agonies of the world. It’s an overwhelmingly, you know, difficult thing to do.

You’ve got to deal with actors and temperaments and scripts and second acts and third acts and camera work and costumes and sets and editing and music, and you know, there’s enough in that to keep you distracted almost all the time. And if I’m locked into what would appear to be a painful situation because half my movie works, let’s say, and the whole second half of it doesn’t work, or a character in my movie is terrible, you don’t believe the love story or something, these are all problems that are, or generally are, solvable with reshooting, with editing, with thinking, diagnosing what’s wrong. And they distract you from the real problems of life, which are unsolvable and very painful problems.

Also in the problems of moviemaking, if you don’t solve your problem, all that happens to you is that your movie bombs. So the movie is terrible. So people don’t come to see it. Critics don’t like it. The public doesn’t like it. This is hardly a terrible punishment in life compared to what you’re given out in the real world of human existence.

Working our way through anxiety-producing situations may be the essence of life if it teaches us how to accurately diagnose situations, train our interpretive facilities to identify what’s really going on, adopt idioms giving us mastery over a small slice of life, or develop cons and scams for beating the system one way or another. Consciousness offers us a range of such powerful survival techniques to apply in particular cases. Members of congress try most of them—inevitably disillusioning their constituents by the deviousness of their means for maintaining their public image while abusing the power of their office. But there are no good guys—or gals—it turns out, only those with a will to live and thrive. In the big leagues, innocents, idealists, and dreamers get eaten alive. No one is larger than life, for life is run by consciousness, and that as everyone knows can get pretty seamy.

Am I more jaded than the next person? Naive, perhaps, but not jaded. I haven’t given up on humanity just yet, thought I have my doubts. I still believe consciousness is worth studying, but it sometimes takes a strong stomach. I figure that if our record is ever to improve, we are going to have to come to terms with ourselves. Evidence points to the fact that we are selfish bastards always seeking to advance our personal cause at others’ expense. More likely, we are doing the best we can under extremely difficult circumstances to figure out what is going on in and around ourselves. In truth, I think we are half  babes in the woods, half hungry wolves—innocence and cunning wrapped in the same fleece.

Besides anxiety signaled by the amygdala, other neural-based features shared by situations, interpreter modules, and both idioms and elixirs of consciousness include: a strong sense of cohesion through time, expectancy, reliance on sensory feedback, executive judgment and decision-making, motor planning, and execution of specific behaviors. Thus the amygdala relays messages to several higher areas of cerebral cortex, which ultimately shape and execute behavior, and look to subsequent feedback from appropriate sensory areas. This is an extremely rough sketch, but to me the keystone of this activity is the potential danger or opportunity available to the conscious organism as signaled by the amygdala. The follow-up details appear to be a function of individual judgment and decision-making based on learning, prior experience, and current expectations.

Consciousness, it seems to me then, is not based on prowess and ego so much as on stress and anxiety. If that is true, it would appear to be one of our best defenders within cultural situations which natural evolution could never anticipate. In rising to consciousness, each of us is on her own, doing the best she can to cope with situations that might well undo her. Going solo, we have a great many options for dealing with such situations. Diagnosing more-or-less accurately what’s going on in a given situation is one of them. Interpreting ever-changing relationships in meaningful terms is another. Adopting the idiom and special expertise of one favored discipline is a third. And applying magic elixirs or fudge factors in order to view situations in terms of a predetermined ideology no matter what is a fourth option among others I have not considered in this post.

In dealing with personal fear and anxiety, evolution hands the choice to consciousness—namely us. Whether we deal on the basis of greed, faith, evidence, prejudice, or aesthetics is up to each of us personally. In selecting the choice we prefer, we reveal who we are. The scary part is realizing that how we choose determines the wiring of our brains by strengthening the synapses involved. We become the creatures of our prior choices. Which is why growing up is so hard—think of the child soldiers of Africa. “Survival of the fittest” is shorthand for those who make the best choices under the circumstances being more apt to make it than those who select poor choices for whatever reason. Life requires endlessly dealing with anxiety as evolution intended. If we flub-dub around, we are apt to be dead.

 

 

Reflection 116: Maggie’s Garden

(Copyright © 2009)

But enough of my own consciousness. I am also interested in how other people experience their own minds. Since I do not have direct access to other minds in other bodies leading other lives, I leave the reporting of what they discover through personal introspection to them as being complementary to my own research.

From time to time I will post (as guest blogs) such reports as I come across them. Today I have permission to share a piece recently published in the Vassalboro Quarter Newsletter, “A Garden of Forgiveness” by Maggie Edmondson, who lives in Readfield, Maine. Maggie writes, “I am very interested in imagination and the spiritual power of metaphor.”

A GARDEN of FORGIVENESS

Maggie Edmondson

While I was in England this time last year the Chelsea Flower Show was in full swing. There were something like thirty 10×20 gardens created for the event by landscape artists and for several evenings there were shows about them on the television. As a garden lover I enjoyed this tremendously and noted down features I thought I might be able to incorporate in my own garden.

But I also wondered how people might benefit from the garden idea who had no land to plant. My imagination started to work with the idea of designing an inner garden. How would that garden look and feel and smell? Would it be all tranquil shades of green as some of those Chelsea gardens were, maybe accented with a few pure white flowers? Would it have waterfalls or other water features to give it an element of purification and regeneration? Would it be a riot of color to replace a sense of bleakness? Would its form be simple and elegant or strange and fanciful? I had a feeling that if we were to allow our hearts and imaginations to do their nonverbal, image-building work, we might create individualized inner garden retreats which would feed our souls.

Then, through one of those wonderful “coincidences” when I attended meeting that Sunday a Friend who was a keen gardener spoke about her struggles to forgive things from her past. She expressed it as a desire to plant a garden of forgiveness. My imaginings of an inner garden became focused over the next few days toward an inner garden of forgiveness. I started to choose plants appropriate to my memories of places or people—a mulberry tree, a wall covered in climbing roses, bluebells, primroses and blackberry bushes, a stream with stepping stones. I also remembered some of the attributes traditionally associated with certain plants:

Gerbera daisies for beauty and innocence—what a wonderful thing to plant where there has been ugliness and abuse;

Irises for faith, hope and wisdom where there has been despair or lack of direction;

Vines for new life, regeneration in those places which seem dead and withered;

Honeysuckle for generosity where there has been selfishness or closed-fistedness;

Roses for love and admiration, where there has been anger or hatred or lack of appreciation; and

Forget-me-Nots, whose name says it all.

That garden lives vividly within my imagination, within my spirit. I can walk its pathways, experience its healing presence, feel the spirit of the One in whom we live and move and have our being. Thanks be to God who speaks to us in so many ways, including our imaginations.

Reflection 104: Myth of the Market

 

 

(Copyright © 2009)

 

I remember climbing Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire on a hot, August day. Not the actual climb so much as the heat and the glare. I hadn’t liked the feel of the pack against my back, so I’d stashed it between the roots of a shady tree at the base of the trail. My hat was in that pack, along with my water bottle. It was a glorious day with no wind, yet brutal in its way. Bare granite reflected the heat, broiling me from above, baking me from below. Like mad dogs and Englishmen, I kept on as if I didn’t know any better. Dazed, not caring about the view, I touched base at the top and immediately turned down. I can’t recall any details of the decent. My one thought was water in the bottle snug in my pack. My throat was dry, my eyes itched. I pictured myself reaching the tree, ripping open the pack, drinking, drinking. Which is pretty much how it went. I sat on the moss at the base of the tree for ten minutes thinking what a fool I had been. A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse! Desperation increases the value of that which you need but cannot have. My million-dollar swig behind me, I drained the bottle with a trickle worth almost nothing.

 

Supply and demand in the marketplace are said to set the value of things. The crucial question is, What’ll you give me for this? What’s it worth to you? Not later; right here, right now! That’s how barter works. On Bosworth field, King Richard III would have paid his kingdom for a horse. I would have given ten dollars for a drink on Monadnock. When the farmers’ market is about to close, the asking price for produce that won’t keep drops through the floor.

 

That’s the going price. But beyond pragmatics, what’s the true value of a drink of water, or of a horse for that matter? Does our market economy reflect the true value of the goods and services on which our livelihoods depend? Beyond the marketplace, what is the true cost of milk, hamburger, plywood, gas, a flight to Honolulu from Los Angeles?

 

Depends on who you ask, where you ask, when you ask. If, as I have heard, the entire watertable of Afghanistan is polluted, then a drink of pure water to quench your thirst in Kandahar is worth more than you’d think. Which is why people drink so many boiled fluids in the form of tea, coffee, yak’s blood, etc. And non-Muslims drink alcoholic beverages that kill germs.

 

What do we need to sustain life? For starters we need clean water, fresh air, good food, shelter from the elements, clothing that suits us to the prevailing climate, waste disposal, transportation when we need it, healthcare, love, security, social order, and so on. If our life truly depends on such items being available, then in a very real sense they are priceless. If we can’t survive without them, the question then becomes, what is the market value of life itself?

 

Ask any mother to put a price tag on her child’s head and she’ll say, Don’t be ridiculous! Look at what parents go through in rearing their children. Without complaint. Just the opposite—with boundless love. What’s that love worth? Everything to the ones who give and receive it. Very little to those outside the loop of household intimacy.

 

We all depend on a healthy planet. How does the market evaluate that? Has it done an assessment on a comparable planet? Could it even locate one comparable to Earth? Clearly, sadly, the market ignores the issue completely. As if Earth has nothing to do with all those goods and services it evaluates with such care. Which reveals the entire economic enterprise—including the market at its core—to be the sham that it is. Put simply, the economy we have is not worth bailing out when it gets itself into trouble. We need an Earth-centered economy that puts our values where our bodies are, not just our minds.

 

Market economies are a myth because they neither work nor exist. They are a false claim made by those who benefit from the idea of a market as a ruse for hoodwinking the public into parting with (formerly, “investing”) its money. There is no fair and equable way to set price levels on goods and services that are priceless by definition. The price of anything is what the market will bear. That is, what the seller can get away with. In that regard, most of us are chumps most of the time. Looking to make a killing, but chumps nonetheless. Exhibit A: Clientele of Bernie Madoff and his cohort of Ponzi-scheming impresarios. Exhibit B: The rest of us who didn’t see it (the collapse) coming because, beyond our usual haze, we were in a state of deep oblivion.

 

The market works as long as we believe in it. Lose that innocent trust, and it immediately collapses as a myth before our eyes. Which is where it belongs, a heap of rubble at our feet. Instead of setting fair value, the market deceives us into mistaking the sacking of the Earth for liberty and prosperity. Which is exactly what Friedman and Hayek claimed for a free market economy. Which turns out to be just another theological fantasy to keep the people doped-up and happy while their pockets are being picked.

 

The whole enterprise rests on the notion of private property—that Earth, its land, and its produce can be owned by elite members of one of the species that owes all to its sheltering niche (nest) and habitat. The only problem with the market economy is that it leaves out the best parts—its absolute dependence on the goodness and toleration of the planet that makes it possible in the first place—and which it sacks day by day. Aside from those minor flaws, it makes a good bedtime story.

 

But it’s daylight now and time to awaken to the world that truly supports our every endeavor—the natural world run by complex ecosystems beyond our control—which we repay by setting up phony markets making it easy for us to take far more than our share, and by smearing our offal and toxic waste across its flesh.

 

So much for marketing dreams and billing the Earth. It is one thing for the market to collapse; another for Earth to collapse as collateral damage. Even if we didn’t mean it, we are responsible nonetheless. Behind every exchange of goods and services, all barter, all trade, all economic enterprise, all supply and demand, all private property, all ownership, all liberty and prosperity—stands the Earth. When it fails, we are lost. When it fails due to our efforts and our lack of caring, we are guilty. When it fails because we aren’t conscious of what we are doing, we are truly pathetic.

 

I have read papers in academic journals arguing what one American bald eagle is worth to the human economy. A certain mode of thought looks upon ecosystems as providing services having calculable market value. But the real question is what is the value of the human economy to that eagle, that ecosystem, or to any assembly of creatures, plants, fungi, and bacteria, or to Earth itself? Very little, it turns out. Or, if we are of any value to Earth at all, it is a negative value meaning we owe a debt for everything we have taken and placed on the market. When we see what we have done and are doing to our home planet, then, and only then, can we lay claim to being fully conscious. Until that time, we are in the market solely for personal gain, and are blind to Earth and its plight at our mistreatment.

 

In the forty years since that dry hike on Monadnock, I have made a point of bringing water in my fanny-pack. Even people who are not fully conscious are capable of learning. Life experience is the true master teacher. Just as sweaters are knit stitch after stitch, consciousness is built one episode at a time. If we live long enough, and are open to experience, we begin to get the hang of being fully conscious.

 

Now that many of our great institutions are in full collapse, we have an opportunity to ask what we might learn from the experience. Do we really want to rebuild the economy as it was before—or can we view this as an opportunity for trying something new? Like basing whatever economy we come up with on the fact that the true burden of humanity’s wellbeing rests on the many ecosystems supporting our every endeavor. Maybe human life can be sustainable after all. It’s an idea worth looking into. Let’s explore what happens when we submit our wares to Earth’s marketplace instead of our own, and see if we get any bids from other species.

 

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