our human complexity

Turning to the Integrity side of Intellectual Integrity

2010-11-17T08:03:00.002-06:00

I read this in Salon this morning, and I thought it would serve us well as I talk a bit about the Integrity side of the equation. Being human as I've been saying, entails our living in Reality through our ideas in a way that's more primary than our biology. The danger in this, is that though our ideas need to feel coherent to us, they can cohere to ideas without cohering to Reality. When this is the case, we could say that such a person is being Ideological. That is, a person in the throes of their ideology, is ultimately invested in the ideology remaining alive, even at the cost of others.

So as we begin looking at the Integrity side of things, we have to discern whether our ideas are cohering to Reality, or are they merely cohering to some abstraction of Reality, which is all an ideology can ever be?

In light of my suggested context, what do you think of this congressman's relationship to Reality? Is it ideological? Or is he practicing Integrity?

Incoming GOP congressman wants his free government healthcare now!

Maryland Rep. Andy Harris is outraged to learn that he'll be uninsured for almost 30 days

BY ALEX PAREENE

Andy Harris

Representative-elect Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican and anesthesiologist, beat his incumbent Democratic opponent by campaigning against the terror of universal socialized medicine. Despite the fact that his opponent voted against healthcare reform, Harris insisted that once elected he would vote to repeal healthcare reform. Now he is elected! And he was shocked to learn that his free, taxpayer-funded, government-run healthcare won't kick in until 28 days after he's sworn in. This made him upset!

“He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care,” said a congressional staffer who saw the exchange. The benefits session, held behind closed doors, drew about 250 freshman members, staffers and family members to the Capitol Visitors Center auditorium late Monday morning,”.

Then he came up with a pretty good idea: "Harris then asked if he could purchase insurance from the government to cover the gap...." Yeah -- why can't people just purchase health insurance from the government? Oh, right, because of Joe Lieberman and every Republican in Congress.

"'This is the only employer I’ve ever worked for where you don’t get coverage the first day you are employed,' his spokeswoman Anna Nix told POLITICO." It's funny because lots of people have worked places where you don't get coverage any day you're employed.

God bless the random anonymous aide who exposed this guy as a tool a month before he was even sworn in.

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene

Intellectual Integrity and Meaning

2010-11-09T07:41:00.002-06:00

I'm wondering this morning, what the difference is between the idea of intellectual integrity and the idea of what it means to be human? I know Dr. Pete began this thinking exploration with a particular incident. However, the phrase intellectual integrity on that day stood out differently than I normally see it. So even though I'm going beyond the parameter of his initial post, I'm only trying to go further into his own thinking about Mind. And my own. And yours.

What surprises me is how big the idea of intellectual actually is- it carries a lot more than our typical use which usually only signals tones of being erudite, elitist, or just plain stuck up—both in attitude and altitude. To be intellectual, in reality, simply means that we pretty much carry our sense of being in language. And once we are talking about language, we are implicitly talking about meaning. And communicating; so to be an intellectual organism means that the realm of our existence is language, meaning, and the expressing and receiving of meaningful information—to ourselves and each other; in contrast to fish for instance, which has as a primary realm of existence, water. Or bears, which crap in the woods because it doesn't/can't dawn on them to wonder if someone's going to talk about 'em. (If bears only knew what we were saying about them…would they make bathrooms?)

You could say that intellectual life is a life lived in meaning. The problem with that short statement though, is that our sense of meaning isn't very intelligible. Oh- we know when we experience something as meaning-full, as well as when something is meaningless. In a like manner, we also know when we experience gravity, and when we don't. And I would offer that where meaning and gravity are most alike, is in the way they both exist like "fields", are irreducible to anything else, and in the way we don't understand how they come about in the first place. More, without gravity, mass makes no sense and likewise, without meaning, information makes no sense. However, where gravity and meaning differ--in terms of most consequence to us--is how our understanding of Gravity is more intelligible than our understanding of Meaning.

Riddle: What has force but doesn't have mass or acceleration? Meaning.

For human being at least, (I can't speak for bacteria) meaning has real causative affect; when we mean to do something is to equally say we intend to do something. Or the meaning on the look of your face may incite me to action; you show distress and I move to help out: an effect is caused without Newton's logic there to describe and predict that effect.

We in our beautiful ways of science understand nature in ways we don't understand meaning. Yet without Meaning scientists can't exist, and neither can engineers. And without civil engineers, bathrooms can't exist. There's something more profound to the realm of meaning than Hallmark cards can reveal. To understand intellectual integrity, or what it is to be fully human, we have to have an intelligible sense of Meaning that has an existence in the way gravity does.

About This Blog (under construction)

2010-10-28T09:57:00.002-05:00

This blog is about experiencing ourselves as fully alive--and more importantly--fully human

Toward this end, we're about developing a new context to better envision the living of our lives together; a context that doesn't rely on our contraptions, but instead, relies on the very genius which makes us human in the first place: our Mind and Heart.

Contraption: "Originally a western English dialectical word, probably made from the words, contrive and trap." (Wiktionary.)

Clocks rely on traps to change mechanical motion into readable time. And since Newton, we've been contriving our life together in terms of machines like clocks. Which isn't all bad, especially when it replaces a world contrived by superstition and unseen spookiness. Yet despite our success in growing beyond a spooky world, how come our time is marked by malaise, frustration, anger, fear, and "ideology-ism"? Could it be that the very source of our complaint flows from not feeling ourselves truly alive and truly human? And if this is the case, where is our source stopped? How does a life lived in contraption differ from a life lived from mind and heart?

In other words, we can live our lives via contraption, but

Considering Intellectual Integrity: A Domain as Real as Biology?

2010-10-24T09:20:00.008-05:00

Part two in an experimental series with PJ who writes about mind at:
http://findingthelightindarktimes.blogspot.com/2010/10/honesty-and-intellectual-integrity.html

We're not just biological, we're intellectual. In fact, I wonder if we're not more intellectual than biological. Maybe, we could say that when ever any species predominately experiences their living through intellect rather than biology, that species, potentially speaking, is human in its being.

What is it to be human then? Is our exploration leading us to assert simply, that Human Being is the one who's connection to its environment is primarily intellectual rather than biological?

I think I stalled in discussing Saul's ideas, because as I set out to actually write about them, I began to realize just how much we lack an ability to see this intellectual domain that we are. We somehow can't yet give it the force of reality we attribute to biology- or physicality: Physics is a hard science; Psychology is a soft one. And, what's become so strange to me, is how we'll go all ga ga over the weirdness of quantum domains, but when it comes to the existence of an Intellectual domain, the best we muster, is to say something like "wow"- our brains are like really cool computers...

But intellectual life is not computing life. It's something a whole lot more- both in ability and kind isn't it?

Another question: which is more real, Brain or Mind?

I was reading some Alfred North Whitehead a couple of evenings ago before going to sleep. The problem however came when I read this thought and the ensuing excitement revived me for another hour. His thought was timely and pertains to our questions. Let me show you:

Whitehead talked about physical reality in terms of its primary and secondary attributes. So, for instance, take the color "teal". Teal's primary existence is some kind of energy wave with a particular frequency (imagine stretching out a long cooked spaghetti noodle on a table, and with your finger make it into a series of "s" shapes from left to right; this is a model of a thing's primary existence as an energy wave). As such, there's nothing about it to suggest "greenish blue". The greenish-blue occurs as a secondary attribute. However--and this is what aroused me-- that secondary attribute doesn't exist unless there is some kind of receiver that can interpret that wave into our color teal! Objective reality, the way we typically construe it as something that exists regardless of human observation, is in reality, a bland colorless tangle of spaghetti noodle-like waves that doesn't take on color unless there's an "interpretive" interaction. (So now I'm wondering which is indeed primary in the color teal- its underlying wave? or a meaningful interaction? But that's another post.)

"Reality as Interpretive Interaction". This is the first time that I've uttered this phrase, so it's still a bit over my head- but I'm liking it; I think my new phrase points to the idea that brains do more than compute in a physical environment, which in reality, is something that exists through a process of interpretive interaction, rather than the Standard Objective Model we've been employing for the last few centuries.

Here's an interesting twist I'll use to tie things up here: I have no idea what it's like to see the color teal from a purely biological perspective. My interaction with the environment is intellectual- not biological. This also means, that I don't know how my brain experiences the wave length of teal, but I do know how my Mind does.... I'm beginning to see why and how PJ is all ga ga about Mind.

I

Considering Intellectual Integrity

2010-10-21T14:59:00.008-05:00

My favorite part in being involved with blogging has been meeting and engaging with people whom I would never had met otherwise. In fact, the favorite part of my own blog is reading all the thought provoking things you guys write. I bring this up because with this post, I want to connect with a writer I've gotten to know from 13.7 who calls himself PJ here. PJ is degreed in aeronautical engineering, business, medicine and psychology; he cites the gravitational center in all this as Mind. It was his sense of Mind that drew me to him, and it was something he recently wrote which serves as the diving board into my thinking here.

So I'm gonna try something new and link to his essay on intellectual integrity for you to read. And then I'm gonna write through the ideas I encountered as I worked with his thinking. And if any of you get inspired to write a piece beyond commentary on your own blog, we'll link that into the pile and see where all our commenting with each other goes!

(Oh- and I think this discussion will get me closer to actually discussing J.R. Saul's ideas...) here's the link: http://findingthelightindarktimes.blogspot.com/2010/10/honesty-and-intellectual-integrity.html

When I first read PJ's piece, I read it I think with the intentions he meant. However, something else for me opened up in my encounter: I saw how this thing we call intellectual is the means, or the basis, or the environment, of our being human. I know we customarily use the word intellectual to denote something like cognitive activity in contrast to emotional activity, but in this moment, I saw the concept intellectual stand for the whole place where we encounter our ability to consider in all its forms- whether they originate from feeling or thinking. In either case, we ultimately encounter reality through our ideas, and ideas whether simple or complex, red neck or elitist, are things which formulate in something that can't be reduced to brain; In that moment I saw that domain as our intellect.

Seeing this led me into two other thoughts. First, being intellectual is not the same as being a brainiac. I'm saying that any person who has the experience of conversation within themselves--whether that conversation bounces around the ideas of beer preferences, or the ideas of possible sources of gravity--such a being is an intellectual being.

Second, I saw new meaning when my different way of seeing intellectual was coupled with integrity: Biologically speaking, when our bodies encounter a challenge to their integrity, they communicate through a means we've learned to call symptoms. What if we learned to see this domain of our existence--which here I'm calling intellectual--with the same force of reality we attribute our biology? What would the symptoms look like when the integrity of our intellectual domain was challenged?

So there's my diving board. I don't mean to make this into an argument about definitions; I'm interested in considering the real human dynamics beneath the language we use to explore them with-- which of course involves words; we're intellectual being after all. I'm just saying that I'm not necessarily married to any of them.

Some of my questions include

Can Mind or its subset(?) "intellectual domain" be considered as real as biological bodies?

What would this look like if we did?

What if truth or intellectual integrity was something more than moral? what if it was something structural or ontological to the human life?

Finally, let me add that between our two posts on Intellectual Integrity, the questions and threads might run different courses, which I think would be a great thing. The point in this is to see where the exploration leads us. I'm really excited to see where everyone's thinking goes!

...On the Other Hand, We're Co-Evolutionaries.

2010-09-30T10:20:00.006-05:00

I began writing this post as the one to occupy the space of my last post, but it was the last one that came out. Let's see if I can get it to come out here....

A concept as close to my heart as the concept of Co-creating, is the one of Co-Evolving. Let me riff a bit, and see what you think.

Our Universe, as we've gotten to know it, followed an arrow of time; as it did, it also grew in complexity. We call this Evolution. And we've come to typically think of evolution within the framework of surviving, which is to say simply, the stuff that's here today exists because its forebears survived through yesterday. (Or yester-eon....) I think a prime example of what I'm trying to describe is the Grizzly Bear: when it comes to surviving, it's a tank. Only more elegant.

Sure- when it comes to survivability we have to give a nod to bacteria, or the mushroom, (which has the honor of being the largest organism alive on our planet). But along the arrow of time life doesn't just survive, it grows more complex. So when we link complexity with survivability, we have to obviously consider the Grizzly bear don't we? I'ts an omnivore and is suited to live in all weather conditions; and when food might be scarce, as it often is in winter, it can hibernate. I'm sure you might have another favorite choice for the pinnacle of survivability, but your choice would never displace the Grizzly, only stand or swim next to it. However, you might ask, "what about human being?"

This is where I think things get even more interesting. As life continued its march along time, In human being, life grew even more complex than the Grizzly.

In the framework of survival, Life reaches a pinnacle in the Grizzly. Yet Life continues further into complexity, through the evolution of human being, and seems to be accomplishing something else than what it accomplishes in Grizzly Bears- something else besides surviving: What is this something else?

Co-Evolution! I would offer, that the species we call Human Being, is the one species who has a real say in how it evolves. So what can we say about all this?!

Merlin Donald, a neuroscientist who cross pollinates with archeology and anthropology, points out that the biological platform which you and I live with today--specifically our brains--has been in existence for about 180,000 years. This means, that our evolution since then, hasn't stemmed from processes of an "at-large biology" alone, but from processes of what Dr.Peter Hubbard, another scientist, who in his case cross pollinates physics based, with social based sciences, would here call Mind. (And- collective Mind- which is what we also call culture.)

In other words, we who are human being today, didn't just evolve, we co-evolved: with Life and each other. We are involved with the Universe in a joint project....

I'll end here for now with this. I say in my subtitle that I'm out to create a space between Science and Religion; a space from which we can venture further into our Human experience. What I'm getting at in this post, is that whichever side of this space you originate, we are bound together by this: In human being, life leaps from inevitability to response-ability. We are, at Heart and in Reality, Co-creators and Co-evolutionaries.

A Love Affair that Still has Great Affect

2010-09-26T10:10:00.020-05:00

While I may be loathing in constraining my thinking within a Christianity context, I find that in a secular context, people are loathe to think of the human life as something richer than animal life. My sense is that such an attitude is hoped to engender a more humble human presence- one that doesn't imperialize every thing in its path. Of course I laud this desire for humility. Still, if we, through this means of humility, blind ourselves to authentic human life, I don't know that such humility will in the end serve us.

So this is what I'm wondering, "what if our problem of this imperialistic consuming, in actuality, stems from our actions of compensating for not experiencing authentic human life? And what if we don't experience authentic human life, because in reality, we have a hard time seeing it? How would we go about looking for it then?

One way I can think of is through the process of comparing and contrasting.

Now, I didn't grow up with church, nor did I grow up with wine. And yet, here I am: a man who has a love affair with God and wine; and my relationships to both lack their respective conventional approaches. Something I feel very fortunate for. Here, let me trace some of the history to my love affair with wine.

When I got into wine back in the late eighties, around the age of 29, I was introduced and educated through a group in Minneapolis called the Bacchus Wine Society. Every month or so, they'd rent a hotel banquet room filled with tables set for ten, with each table bearing a big center tray of cheese and crackers, a couple of spit buckets (usually empty KFC chicken pails) and most importantly, two wine glasses per person. Well, maybe more important were the eight bottles of wine; still, the two glasses were as important here, because we would take turns serving wine to each other, two bottles at a time; it was having two glasses each, which enabled us to compare and contrast between two different wines at the same time. Do you want to know what tannins are and how they affect a wine's taste? Pour one glass with a wine that has them, and the other with a wine that doesn't. Here is where tasting speaks more than even pictures can, and just how good comparing and contrasting works.

I feel blessed for those wine tasting evenings way back then. For one reason, the seating was random. Each event I attended, I could have been sat with wine snobs- the ones who relate to wine more as status than experience, and love to wear their wine drinking like a badge. The people I was lucky enough to sit with, the ones who were real lovers, cared about the experience- for themselves as well for me. And while I learned to swirl a glass and get my nose into one as well as any snob, (I got my nose wet a couple of times while starting out) when it came to sharing our personal experience of each of the wine's unique set of elements, I was always in an environment where I felt free to use any words in my vocabulary; there was never a pressure to pull words from some proper wine lexicon.

Out of all those terrific events, there’s this one night I remember most...one that provided a particular moment of learning about wine; this moment I remember today with absolute fondness. It came about when Mary, a woman about fifteen years older, and with that much more wine experience than me, said something with this gracious gentle exuberance for all things alive, and just tossed out, "I taste eucalyptus..." So I rushed and took another taste of the same wine--it was my left side glass--and there it was! I tasted eucalyptus! It was amazing! How does something that's fruit, make eucalyptus?!

I learned some things that evening, which I keep in my heart today. Not only did Mary teach me to look for eucalyptus, somehow--that moment of learning that eucalyptus was present--made me aware of the nature of ignorance and how we learn of it. Most notable are these thoughts:

-Compared to other animal species, I would cite as a salient difference this fact: we are the ones who can know of our ignorance. And it is this power that gives rise to one of our abilities which is even more powerful: we can form questions.

-Like the man who learned to fish, I do more than look for eucalyptus, I look for other things that I may not be accustomed to look for. This insight, transcends wine and translates across the board.

-Even though I was drinking the same wine as Mary, when I didn’t have the concept of eucalyptus apart from a cough drop, I wasn’t able to taste it in the wine. We need more than our eyes to see, we need our ideas. (Where do we ideas?)

-I learned something more about wine tasting, and when I did, wine’s mystery of alchemy only became more mysterious. (Btw, when something really is a Mystery, and not a puzzle, the more you know of it, the more—not less—mysterious it becomes.

-And finally, when you want to learn wine, comparing and contrasting between two bottles at a time proves very productive--even seductive. It’s in this spirit that I sometimes compare and contrast our human life with other kinds of animal life. I’m not out to determine and define—that is make some version of a “wine snob lexicon”—when I engage in such comparing and contrasting. Rather, I’m trying to create a means to explore our human life with the same kind of grace I experienced with people like Mary and the others, who loved wine, and relished taking turns at pouring new bottles into awaiting glasses.

Maybe, through this kind of tasting of our human life, we will begin to taste things we didn't realize were there. And as we find that there’s so much more to taste in the human life than consuming, we'll no longer feel such a dire need to acquire things the same way an addict gets locked in by his drug.

Maybe we'll displace our imperialistic compensating, by deeply enjoying a new love affair with our very Human-ness.

Which would God prefer, our worship or our colleague-ship

2010-09-13T12:13:00.010-05:00

I loathe the idea of talking about our human experience solely within a Christian context, even though the Christ Event has been a deeply meaningful experience for me, and has significantly shaped my sense of reality. I recently responded in a comment section to a blog entitled "Experimental Theology", written by Dr. Richard Beck who is a professor of psychology. I like his work a lot, though we differ in that he mostly is referencing a Christianity framework. And I'm not.

Still, I'm interested in influencing how we think about GoD and the Christ Event. And I thought this response to David, a man who typifies well, an evangelical pov (I'm not singling him out) might give you a glimpse of some of my own theological thinking. But first a caveat:

I'm using God language here for the sake of communicating with brevity to an evangelical culture. I wince when I use God language. Please allow me some grace as you read my comment- whether you hale from a God culture or don't- and see the spirit or mind behind my writing....

David, in an earlier thread, you challenged my claim that we are called to be adult colleagues with God in the making of Life together. I would like to answer your challenge here, and utilize the style of Jesus' approach to this discussion, by utilizing modern sewer systems as an underlying analogy for my point.

It is argued, that when it comes to the increased longevity and health of human being in the modern era, this increase doesn't stem from modern medicine, but from modern sewer and water systems- simply because they deal with the micro organisms causing illness in the first place.....

If this is the case, how is the making of competent sewer and water systems NOT a "Kingdom of God" activity?

Out of all the animals God creates, we of the Human species are the ones, who on the seventh day, when God rests, are invited to join Him in a picnic- as the story goes. Doesn't this sound like we are truly invited to colleague-ship? In contrast, I Love my dog and the feeling seems mutual; but I have yet to experience an adult human relationship with him.

We like Heaven when its free and we don't have to do the work and create it. In fact, we would rather huddle in worship and pine away for life on a platter. However, I bet when God witnessed our civil engineering to make sewer systems and modern bathrooms, there was a proud tear welling in His eye.

We think that God's essential nature is morality- not Creative Power.

In Reality, morality is easy. Creating is where the hard work is. But we relegate creativity to an afternoon at church camp where everybody gets to make Christian lanyards. At evening services we thunder about morality. The reality of morality though, is that all you have to do is paint the world in black and white and us and them. Then choose a side, puff up your chest and fight away; all the while luxuriating in the bigness of being on God's side: And explain away--that is wax theologically--how every one else is the problem.

Meanwhile, everyone else is maintaining sewer systems, and developing needed energy systems in order to create sustainable thriving for the whole planet. (You know, the thing we're given real creative responsibility for?) Is this the Life that Jesus went to the cross for? That we should take all the genius of God, which we get to embody, and huddle in quivering masses and await that "glorious day"?

In the paradigm of animal sacrifice, God says in Jesus' crucifixion, "look- you guys are still afraid of me. I'll tell you what- if sacrificing your first born child is the most powerful act that you can do to make me be on your side, then I will sacrifice My first born child: no act can be more powerful than this. Let it be settled then; I AM FOR YOU.

The ONLY reason we won't see ourselves as colleagues with God, we who are called to co-create Life together, is because we would rather be afraid, and justify our fear through a theology that God yearns to eradicate in the Life of Jesus.

If Christianity means that I have to dumb down my Human self, dumb down the genius God creates, dumb down Jesus' belief about God, then I would rather give up my Christianity.

But I refuse to give up the Christ: I refuse to back away from my true Humanness, which is a call to co-create real life with our Creator.

2010-08-29T12:29:00.000-05:00

Well, I thought I was gonna be rolling down the tracks with my posts about John Ralston Saul's ideas, way back in May, but as you can plainly see, I didn't roll very far. I can't say that I suffered from some sort of train derailment; still my impedance certainly has something to do with the fact that train tracks have to be linear: while I'm sitting comfortably riding the rail its way, I'm looking out the window and gravitationally pulled into the vistas perpendicular to my inertia!

I haven't felt myself derailed as much as I've felt myself in a stupor. Feeling the gravitational pulls from so many vistas around me at the same time, makes it hard to lay out sentences (for me at least), which, if they're to perform their amazing feats of communication, need to be like railroad tracks. I feel like all I've been able to do for the last few months is stutter....

Part of unwinding my big ball of stutter, entailed my looking at why I'm writing here in the first place: perhaps the only things more abounding in number than String theories, are protestant denominations and blogs! Certainly opinions. But I don't want this blog to be, yet another opinion depot. To me, opinion stockpiling, makes little use of blogging's potential strength: that of connecting with people and thinking, we might not otherwise connect with. For instance, some of you who have signed on as followers and friends I know in person. But some of you, I only know through this blog, or 13.7; cases in point are Peter, Stephen and Alex; I've appreciated your thoughtful writing through the commentary section.

Somehow, I want to make this blog a place where ideas can be forged and annealed; then re-smelted into other alloys and forged again. At the same time, I want this blog to be a place reminiscent of kindergarten where wonder displaces cleverness, and the only dumb questions or comments, are the ones unwritten or the ones that bully: All too often, some innocent word you write, starts an avalanche of ideas in me, which till then, were locked out of my reach.

I have to stop right now, and help my son Ben with his house. I still have more unwinding to do when it comes to my big stutter ball, but I can't do it on my own, and I need your help. I'm so excited for our Human Life though, and I'm excited to explore it with all of you.

Mike

What Constitutes an Entity? Saul I

2010-05-12T10:32:00.005-05:00

I've been surprised by the difficulty I'm encountering in trying to transition to a more formal discussion of Saul's ideas, and I think I just figured out why. John Ralston Saul, to his credit, writes his book in a way that follows his own sense of things: He himself is frustrated by recipeic approaches to living, so doesn't want his ideas to be construed as just another recipe; and he succeeds. Following Saul through the forests of our Humannness is pleasurable as he lets you see things yourself, and lets you develop your own felt sense of things. But I can't reprint the book here, so I think I have to provide some "handles" to better grasp his world view. And hopefully, you'll read the book yourself, because you'll be engaged in a worthwhile dialog with him; it's that kind of book.

To get at a possible handle, let me ask you, "what constitutes an entity"?

Referring back to the grizzly bear of a couple of posts back, and we ask what constitutes one, we would point primarily to biological stuff and habitat stuff. How about an entity like the United States of America, what constitutes this? Why the constitution of course. But wait- the "Constitution" is merely a document made of vellum. On this vellum however, are written a set of Ideas; so it's actually a set of ideas that constitute the USA: change the set of Ideas, and you constitute a different country- right? So now, what constitutes the entity we call Human Being? would we point to biological stuff? ideation stuff? Or is there some other stuff? Yes; yes; and yes. What I'm referring to here as the "other stuff," which we could consider as fundamentally constituting Human Being, Saul calls Qualities. And the quality we are most familiar with in our culture is Reason. In other words, we easily note that the one quality which distinguishes the human animal from all other species, is the quality of Reason.

We don't usually give much thought to this distinction, that's been in place since the Enlightenment: Saul however does. Not so much on whether or not animals can think or not, but on whether or not Reason should be considered as our sole quality that constitutes Human Being. As I asked in my last post for instance, "what about Imagination?" Is Imagination merely a subset of Reason, or is Imagination another Quality that serves a constituting role as much as Reason does? Saul, in answering such a question, doesn't limit his list to two Qualities however. No- he comes up with six! six qualities that constitute our very humanness, and he lists them thusly in alphabetical order: Common Sense, Ethics (Ethicality if this were a word), Imagination, Intuition, Memory, and finally Reason.

If I may paraphrase him, Saul asks, what qualities constitutes the Humanness of Human Being? and answers with his list of six- which exist together equally (as opposed to existing in hierarchy) in a dynamic tension together. Reason is removed from a throne and takes its place with our other qualities which are each just as vital in constituting our Humanness.

Two things He'd want you to know about his list: First, the list is not conclusive; he's not out to make another recipe, another system, another vehicle of sorts that takes us out of living and puts us into a management of forms. Secondly, he derives this particular list of Qualities from all the past attempts by thinkers who sought to consider the qualities that constitute humanness; Saul's list is a distilled representation of them.

A third thing Saul would want us to know about, is his use of the word Quality. And I think this is pretty cool: While we share in things we could call characteristics, or talents, or traits, the distribution of them depend on each individual person existing in their particular time and place. Qualities on the other hand, transcend individuality, and are there to be participated in by any Human Being. We could say that characteristics play a role in constituting an Individual. It is our Qualities though that constitute our very Humanness.

And I'll end here with another part of the question I asked earlier: What does it take for a bear to be more bear? and contrast that with the question, "What does it take for Human Being to become more Human? And of course, ask these in the context of the question, "What constitutes an entity?"

Finally, John Ralston Saul! well- at least a start...

2010-05-05T14:25:00.005-05:00

Living the Human life is innately elusive. For instance, we can know everything there is to know as to how everything about human being works- yet to actually live ourselves into the world requires something else than such knowledge. Knowing about consciousness and brains and the like, helps me understand more of my ability to consider, but when I face the incessant stream of fresh moments that keep marching through me, it is I who have to consider them- not my knowledge of my I. And the same goes for you. What makes this a little more elusive, is that you and I can be standing shoulder to shoulder, and the incessant stream of new moments will be experienced differently and uniquely by each of us.

What I called the Incessant Stream, John Ralston Saul calls the Swirling Uncertainty. Both aptly name the real situation of Human life as well as the true nature of the environment in which we get to experience our powers of consideration. wuhoo!(?) We love considering when we get to consider the flavors of our favorite beverages and such. When we have to lean our selves into the swirling uncertainty though, we reconsider how much of a gift this considering thing is!

The swirling uncertainty is no small thing. I would point out, that at the time of Christ, the Pharisees dealt with it by reducing living to a myriad of codes to follow; for this Jesus confronted them: (notice his confrontations don't center on morality, but on something more like maturity, as the Pharisee's strategy in effect, stunted their considering muscles) .

Though he doesn't say it this explicitly, Saul in our day, looks at our Human situation and notes it as one where we have to consider our way into Swirling Uncertainty. We can try to stop the Swirling, (the Incessant Flow) or, we can develop our ability to consider. Since the Enlightenment project has had as one of its goals, the stopping of the swirling without success, maybe we should switch strategies and become more competent. Towards this, he writes his fantastic book, "On Equilibrium"; a title which will make sense in a bit. (Equilibrium here is used the way economists use it, not the way the rest of science uses it. In economics, equilibrium describes things existing in equalized dynamic movement, where as in science, equilibrium means that change has stopped. Two very different conditions, and as Saul has little respect for a lot of economist thinking, I think he's making use of this to be ironic.)

Some quick biographical back ground. Saul, grew up in a Canadian military family where his dad was an officer, went to McGill University and then Cambridge for his PhD where he studied French History or something like that. But more, he's run a multi-national oil company, and his wife was a Governor in Canada a while ago. He looks to be in his sixties now and through his lifetime, he's had some rather interesting perches from which to do his own considering. Of course, just google John Ralston Saul (note, there is a John Saul who is another novelist.) If you want a more professional bio.

I'll end here with one of Saul's beginning premises. Since the Enlightenment, Reason has been king. But reason is only one of our "tools" with which we can use in our considering. What about Imagination? Is this just a subset of Reason, or is Imagination something that exists with as much autonomy as Reason? Are there other "tools" as well? tools that are also autonomous but have existed under the dictatorship of Reason over the last four centuries? What could be the implications here? Saul raises some interesting ones, and we'll delve more formally into them in the next post.

The Alchemy of Toast and Human Being

2010-05-02T12:35:00.005-05:00

Really, I am making my way into the ideas of John Ralston Saul. Toward that goal, let me ask you a question to ponder:

Both bears and humans exist as selfs. (For an idea of self see Ursala Goodenough's piece, http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/03/the_iself_and_our_symbolic_spe.html

So, for a bear to be more bear, what needs to happen? Likewise, for a human to be more of a human self, what needs to happen?

I just posted this as a comment over at 13.7 and I think it fits our dialog here as well; I hope you like it!

The allure of toasters is the toast they make. What is the allure of toast then? After listing everybody's response we would be able to sort them into two categories: physical/thermodynamic and non-physical/meaning. In a word, I would offer that toast's complex allure, could be understood in the word "alchemy".

To begin, the heart of the engineer behind the toaster, is wed to the heart of the bread maker; and all of us who eat toast become part of the wedding as well... such alchemy happens daily in a gazillion ways!

The question before us in our day, is "how does our shared alchemy result in something closer to gold than to lead?

Our current answer seems to stem from an idea that if we can make the right schematic, and everyone follows it, then we'll be in "working order". If successful alchemy were a matter of Physics alone, then schematics would have worked by now. It seems that alchemy requires a catalyst, and I would argue that for the human life, that catalyst is Meaning.

In terms of thermodynamics, work gets something done that is measurable. If a person feels a deep sense of Meaning behind there working though, something immeasurable emerges; what is that? Certainly something along the lines of alchemy, as well as something closer to gold than lead.

We can weld handles to things like metal pots. But Meaning doesn't lend itself to such easy handling. It squirms away from our grasps that try to bottle it, or make it formulaic.

Thus, in our world of Human Actuality, Technology and Meaning can interact with each other, and ultimately need each other. But neither can replace the other.

Humanness itself is essentially an Alchemy; remove the reality of either the physical or the non-physical, and the Alchemy fails to lead. Which for the human life is not a fail safe, but a failure.

So when I as a thinker, utilize "religious" insight along with "science" insight, it's because I recognize the reality that has its basis in Alchemy, rather than in technology or spirituality alone.

Ursala, I think this is why I'm so in love with the last line of your post. How can Human Alchemy even begin without insight?

Considering Frameworks, Contexts, and the Naked Hokey-poky

2010-04-27T11:52:00.002-05:00

Please forgive my absence from my own blog here. I've been involved with a rather intense season of thinking lately. Some of my thinking has been carried out over at the 13.7 blog's commentary section. While I like that blog as a whole, I especially like the work Stuart Kauffman is doing. Perhaps the one thing I relate most to in his work, is the sense that there's something more to reality than our current frameworks can give voice or vision to. He's sensing this problem of an insufficient framework, predominantly from his context of science, while I'm seeing it predominantly, from a context of religion. For reasons I'll explain later, you could enlarge our respective contexts and describe his as one of Physics, and mine as one of Meaning. In the meantime, I want to address the ideas of frameworks and contexts.

So what am I meaning by frameworks- or contexts? Well, I think we've come to see that reality is not only made of parts, it's also made of wholes that parts make up. Our organs for instance, combine along with other parts to make a whole that is our body: within the context/framework of biology, the heart pumps blood, while in the context/framework of romance, the heart pumps luuuuv.... Simply put, context/frameworks are the overarching "logic" of a whole that organize the meaning of its underlying parts. For instance, seeing someone off in the distance standing and moving their body in random and distorted ways doesn't make sense to us- at least until we get closer and hear the music.... What changed in our ability to make sense of this randomly moving person? Context, right? Because you have a framework about dancing, you were able to involve music in your assessment of the situation and call it normal. (Still, your framework might not allow for our once-randomly -moving-figure-now- dancer, to be naked in public, but at least the dancing part fits:-)

Our Frameworks are important because of this: As human being, we don't see with our eyes, we see with our ideas. What our bio-eyes and brain do, is process the stuff which light illuminates. What our mind's eyes and thinking does on the other hand, is make sense of what is seen by either set of eyes, and to do this, we need ideas. What you're able to see depends on the ideas by which you choose to see with, and- you don't really see something until you experience the sensation of "ah- now I see." Do you see what I'm saying? In other words, your bio-eyes pick up photons illuminating a moving thing on the horizon. Your ideas saw a naked person doing the hokey-poky to a song you remember from your youth when you were roller skating with your friends at the roller rink, and the d.j. got everybody to shift from their personal random boogies to a group event where each in unison dipped their body parts in and out and....

So this is what I'm trying to get at by talking about a context of Physics and one of Meaning: More than a branch of science, Physics is an over-all framework from which to approach the world; Physics at heart is looking at the world in terms of cause and effect. In this sense, even though other branches of science differ from the branch called physics in scope and content and the like, science, I would say is always looking through a primary lens of cause and effect- or Physics. As does our culture at large.

Yet as I'm pointing out here, ideas are central to our seeing; a seeing that doesn't entail from light and optics, but entail from thinking within Meaning: we rely on a different illumination to move about our environments than any other species. Meaning is very different than Physics. So while Physics can make sense of animals acting in their environment, it's an insufficient framework from which to fully understand the human animal living in world. Without a sufficient framework to consider Meaning, we can't sufficiently grasp our Humanness.

And as one who comes from a context we've called religion, I would note that a lot of our religious thinking is at heart Physics based, and lacks a sophisticated vision of Meaning.

Also of note is this: Stuart Kauffman and I, while not knowing one another, each have been dealing with the insufficiency of our beginning frameworks when it comes to their ability to see the reality at large; and as we worked for better solution, we both were drawn into the idea of Creativity: I love his idea that sees the Universe existing as Ceaseless Creativity. I would offer that the GoD Jesus points to is this Ceaseless Creativity; so we're mistaken to think as we typically do, that GoD's ultimate concern is obedience. To me, our mistaken idea is embodied in the parable of The Three Talents where the person Jesus confronts is the one who merely buries his alloted talent; while the ones who create with theirs are admired....

But that's a post for the future.

Considering Dilemma

2010-03-25T12:11:00.011-05:00

Are you gaining the sense of considering as something very fundamental to Human experience yet? I'm not trying to build a formal system by the word consider, still, compared to words like conscious, mind, brain and the like, conceiving our salient human feature in terms of consideration, rises above the fray of debates over issues of how can a mind effect a brain and the like. After all, any of us who have pets will testify to their consciousness and personality; and as Matt brought out in his comment from the last post, we can witness their ability to "consider" (in a way- I would say).

My Golden Retriever named Sam for instance, loves these two things: meat, and having something in his mouth. (To this day, he won't drop his tennis ball on command without pained reluctance.) One day he came up to me on the deck with an old work glove in his mouth; he held it as a piece of luxury. I quickly grabbed a piece of salami and draped it over his snout (he does this amazing trick of holding, and on command he snatches the salami out of mid-air). There he was, sitting with his two loves and having to choose between them: the grimy glove in his mouth, and the salami on his snout. He froze. The only thing that did move, was his drool which streamed into a puddle before his feet. Having garnered sufficient entertainment value, I ripped the glove from his mouth. Sam instantly snatched the salami from mid air with his usual precision.

In terms of the conventional ways we've come to use the word consider, we would say that Sam froze in his "consideration" between two of his loves. Our conventional use of the word though, is a weather worn statue of its original stature; Sam weighed the glove and salami equally, but he couldn't truly transcend his literal being and "see from the place of the stars"- which is the experience the word Consider was originally coined to carry. I'm often impressed by the depth beneath common words when I look into their etymology....

Okay. We really don't know how it gets here, but our ability to consider I would argue, is what allows us to transcend our biological literalness. The thing is, for us to experience consideration in its fullness, we need environments that let such a muscle flex itself: we need environments that can exist as uncertain.

Think about it: to consider is to experience perhaps our core human feature; but if there were no uncertainty, how could consideration be experienced? Consideration and uncertainty, together form a system that gives rise to an environment where our very humanness is felt, and flexed, and found. And this is the rub: We love consideration as long as it doesn't get too beyond our comfortable perches, and we love uncertainty as long as we can still touch bottom: we like conversations with colleagues and the anticipation of Christmas mornings.

We can't just live with colleagues though, nor can we compress a real future into a morning. No matter how hard we try.... And try. And try.

So if we can't make society homogeneous, and we can't shrink a future to a depth in which we need only wade, what's our next option? We have to develop the ability to understand one another with the same care we understand our selves, and we have to learn to navigate deeper waters.

And with this context in mind, we can get into the ideas of John Ralston Saul- ideas that let us further into our Human Complexity.

Considering Will

2010-03-24T10:11:00.006-05:00

I began taking consideration seriously a few years ago while reading an article in the NYT Magazine a few years back which informed me of the fact, that out of the twelve billion or so cells that are in me, only about five billion of those actually are me; the rest comprise other organisms coming along for the ride. That sparked my imagination.

I diverted my eyes from the magazine and gazed upon the nth myriad of critters who outnumbered me and I noticed something: every one of them were doing what they wanted. Hmm- even bacterias are wanting what they want... and what is want? isn't wanting the same as willing? So if even bacteria have will, and then lions have will, the fact that humans have will, isn't a distinction in and of itself. In fact, while we measure will in terms of its power, is ours any more powerful than a lion's chasing down its meal?... I kept watching in my imagination the alpha lion eating his fill, while the other lions, who's standing reached further down the alphabet, were held at bay-regardless of their need. And that's when it hit me: while lions may have wills even more powerful than the human will, what they don't have, is the power to consider. What distinguishes human will from the will that even bacteria posses, is that ours is connected to our innate ability to consider.

By conceiving will in terms of power, we put it on a continuum that bacteria exist on. And after human being in all its will power, annihilates itself, who will still be around? Bacteria. And they don't have the benefit of a frontal cortex.

By measuring human will in its ability to operate through consideration, we posit our measurement on a different continuum, one that doesn't entail from power and freedom, but one that entails from something uniquely human: the ability to look beyond. Human will, shouldn't be measured in terms of power, but in terms of consideration because consideration, is uniquely human. To continue measuring it- thus conceiving it- in terms of power, belies the level of order, Life itself has evolved toward. Human being is the one where Life evolves an ability for a species to experience the power to consider.

Will exercised through power is common to any living organism. Will exercised through consideration however, is uniquely human: we didn't make this reality- but we are required to live within it; whether we real-ize this power to consider, or not. We are free in our ability to consider.

Considering Power

2010-03-18T10:49:00.006-05:00

Out of all the concepts we might employ when pondering human essence in contrast to any other species, we cite concepts like consciousness, language, art, tool use and the like. For me, the concept which has become perhaps my favorite is Consideration.

At first glance, consideration smacks- or rather touches upon- politeness. "One is to be considerate in the presence of their elders" Miss Manners would implore her pupil. Its etymology however, points to a realm of power not of domestication- that of being able to look down from the vantage point of the stars: com (con) is the prefix that denotes with, and sider comes from sidus, meaning heavenly body. I think this capability to shift our perspective to the vantage point of heavenly bodies, is an ability unique to Human Being, and perhaps forms the very basis of our experience of I-self, I-Thou, and broadly put, Subject-Object. Without our innate ability to consider, we couldn't transcend our biology and its singular drive toward biological success on biological terms. A grizzly bear will remain a grizzly bear because it has no way out of its literalness. The only way out of the bonds of literalness is the power of Consideration.

The poets of the Eden story described this ability to consider as being made in the image of GoD; on the seventh day of rest, only those who could consider were able to join GoD for a conversation, while everyone else merrily fulfilled their biological literalness (which is a different kind of satisfaction).

In the context of Evolution, I would put it this way: As Life pushes itself along the arrow of time, it pushes toward more complexity. And in the quest for survivability in nature, it evolves a pinnacle like the grizzly bear which is nature's version of a tank. But Nature continues its march toward complexity and reaches a different level of order that is a -whole something else- than a grizzly bear; a level of order we call Human being. What is this something else we embody that no other species does? I would vote that it's our ability to Consider.

So what shall we do with such power? Argue over how the power arises in the first place, or imagine together how we can put such power to work in the making of our world together?

Through our core ability to poise our looking from heavenly bodies, we can theorize about reality in frameworks of religion or science or any number of ways. But the funny thing about Consideration, what makes it so beguiling, is that after all the theorizing is done, and its dust has settled, we have to consider a fresh moment. All our frameworks can really do, is advise us: they can't consider in our stead. That is unless we abdicate our ability, and ride along like lemmings in a herd of ideologies. But if we surrender our identifying ability of consideration, do we also surrender our very Humanness? And what does such surrender engender?

It's natural to fear heights, and things don't get much higher than the heavenly bodies. What's the difference between thrilling and terrifying? I don't have a ready answer, but I do know that Consideration entails both.

In the Meantime

2010-03-11T13:04:00.007-06:00

My next post here will transition from our thinking of Faith to thinking over John Ralston Saul's ideas. In the meantime, I'm presently writing something to form the basis for a movement to create a voice to contrast the Tea Party. Not on the basis of policy against policy, but on a basis of approach against approach when it comes to making our Society together. I'm calling it the Tavern Party. (America was born in Taverns- not ransacked ships).

Clicking on my profile gets you to the actual blog site. I have the domains secured as well.

Let me know what you think, Mike

A New Common Sense (beginning draft)

America, as history shows, wasn't born in a ransacked ship. America, was born in Taverns. Taverns where people from their walks of life took time to discuss with one another, the idea of giving Democracy another try. The last ones to try it on such a large scale, were the Greeks. They themselves gathered together in "Symposiums" to figure Democracy out; invent it we might say. Think of their Symposiums, as something very akin to our New England Taverns- rather than the dry academic lectures that comprise symposiums today. Maybe the only real difference came from the fact that the climate of Greece favored grapes and wine, while the climate of New England favored grain and beer. In either case, whether from the Greek Symposium, or the American Tavern, Democracy emerged when ordinary people such as you and I, gathered together in a manner that believed in the best of themselves, and of Life- and celebrated the prospect of living into the ultimate form of Society: Democracy.

And who wouldn't get excited at such a prospect? After all, most of human social history is the story of societies forming themselves by a hierarchy of some sort- which most likely funneled most of the flourishing to the top. The top in return, justified their privilege as due them, through some rationale involving God: before Christ it was Caesar; after Christ it was the Church. Democracy was our chance to break up the humanly sculpted irony of some people usurping God for their private gain on the backs of their neighbors.

Democracy (and what Christ really said about neighbors). Democracy's not bound in an ability to vote. It's bound in an ability to make together, a Society that supports diverse Human Life in ways that don't impede Life's innate push toward complexity- the complexity that Life needs in order to flourish. Societies that depend on precise or even vague homogeneity to form themselves, are not Democracies; we call them country clubs. The Tavern Party is formed today with the belief that America is about pursuing real Democracy once again, and that today, we have it backwards when we think ( like the Tea Party) that Democracy is about pursuing America. The America made larger than Democracy, is in reality, a mere ideology- a club of sorts. As for any of us longing for real Democracy know, ideologies exist in minds, and that real Democracy laughs at our puny attempts to domesticate it into some homogeneous geniality that can fit neatly between two ears.

Which is the larger, America or Democracy? When I listen to the war like rhetoric from the Radical Right I could conclude that America is. But I'm not fooled- I'm more intelligent than that; I'm more courageous too- as most of us are on both counts. All it's come to take to be an American it seems, is to do a few simple things: fix a narrow view of the world; wave a flag over it- (or at least wear one on your lapel); reduce complex ideas to taunting rhymes; stand to a side and puff up: things that we first learned to do on our childhood playgrounds, things that our parents and teachers worked so ardently to drive out of our budding characters: for the cause of growing up. Obviously, Democracy is the larger. And as such, is complex and demanding of all our intelligence- and maturity. Not just the kind of intelligence that builds expertise, but the kind that seeks to share in common, the sense of complexity found in Life itself; Life's innate Complexity I would offer, serves as the basis for our new Common Sense.

Basing our new Common Sense on the like of Nature's complexity takes courage though, because Courage faces the large as large; the complex as complex: anger in contrast shrinks things down to size in order to bully it; anger is too easy to come by, and sadly- is often mistaken for Courage. Ideology simplifies reality's innate complexity to bite sized pieces- and sound bites- and reduces Society to a play ground, where ideology bullies all who won't play its game of make believe. Ideology and anger are a natural boy-girl relationship; the kids on such play grounds look for the Alfalfa's and the Darla's for leadership.

meant to continue

The Art of My Parents, Sally and Jerry.

2010-03-09T10:29:00.013-06:00

At heart, I'm an Artist. My parents on the other hand, at heart- are not. Sal and Jer are conventional in a way they aspired to: a stable home life, dinner at five of a meat and potato, and a kindly relationship to their world. Today is their fifty first anniversary and I couldn't be more pleased or more proud that I get to call them Mom and Dad. Sal and Jer accomplished convention valiantly, and I along with my two brothers (twins not quite a year younger than me) and our families (six grand kids) thrive from their convention so valiantly achieved.

So at heart, what is an Artist? I would offer this explanation by way of my own experience and the descriptions of others who share in this experience: an Artist is one who can no longer be bound by convention. Not because convention itself is the problem- it's not; we need convention. It provides the ease required for society to form and create itself; with such ease in place, we become free to spend our energies on real tasks instead of having to also spend it on making up game rules and the like. Convention is utterly important. But it's never permanent: the Life that beckoned an earlier growth, having become satisfied, moves ahead and once again beckons us to grow again and create new convention. Artists are the ones who hear the Call before the rest of their Society; and as such they are the pioneers who willingly leave the finery of Bostons and Philadelphias- conventions so elegant- for the next frontier. And then after living in Life's next frontier, and developing a felt sense of it, Artists return to their place of conventional beginnings with maps. And hope. A hope that the maps will be both cogent and inspiring, as both are needed for people to be willing to risk the Boston they know for the one they'll have to make. To be sure, there are plenty who go by the name artist, but since all they really do is make a carnival of laughing at convention, while remaining within a convention's city limits, these people could more aptly be named jackals- not Artists.

Cogency and Inspiration is a serious responsibility.

This then is the rub: Sal and Jer gave birth to an Artist- one who's called to move past the very thing they not only aspired to- they spent their very selves in valiantly accomplishing: How do real champions of convention- at its best- understand a son, who through nobody's fault or planning, hears that beckoning call from our new frontier, and try as he might, can't ignore it?

The cliche' says that an artist's parents were establishment dolts who bought into capitalist dreams and strove for material riches in a way, that any one with a "right mind" (anti establishment) would rebel against such a travesty of authentic human being. But Sal and Jer didn't participate in the cliche'. They took convention seriously and embodied it in the way Life means it to be lived. They didn't give me anything to rebel against. Instead, they gave me something to aspire to; a life who's convention seeks decency in any way it can.

I say this now, in honor of my parents and their anniversary because over the last few years, I have been able to again take up my Artist responsibilities of leaving the likes of Boston for our new frontier and map making, because my own two sons are happily involved with the women they will make their lives with. They are living into convention in a style that began with their grandparents; a style that I could only duplicate, a style to which Ben and Jake are now aspiring. My Dad, who began from a life of smoldering violence, joined with my Mom and created a home where I got to flourish ( in their home, anyone would); because of Sal and Jer's commitment to convention, our family history has a new trajectory that is now embodied in their grand kids. How far can such a trajectory of complete decency reach?

Your reach, Mom and Dad, is the very basis from which I'm willing to trust Life's beckoning into its frontier and leave the finery of Boston and Philadelphia- and your Convention. Not because I find some fault in the Convention you accomplished so well, but because Life has a way of growing and then beckoning us to grow along with it. And when its time to grow, it falls to the Artists to make the Frontier and ways into it both cogent and inspiring. I hope for you to see that my work doesn't contradict you, it comes from you.

Happy Anniversary- I love you more than you could know.

Mike.

Incarnation, Ambiguity and Love. For Matt and Sara

2010-02-28T09:55:00.009-06:00

Paradox is easy. Ambiguity takes Love.

This past week, my new family in-law suffered the loss of their new baby whom they named Evvy: the Cleavers, our favorite kind of family, were smashed by a loaded Semi. It wasn't sudden though, they didn't recklessly step into the street. Sara and Matt, young parents of two, learned that all the Mystery that so effortlessly forms babies, (universes really, when you compare them in every way to their own Beginning Bang) failed to form Evvy's kidneys; Potter's Disease is the clinical taxonomy: what do you call it when no clinic, no matter its might, can veer the inevitable truck?

Matt and Sara, packing so much courage into such young lives, determined with their family, that Evvy would know nothing but Love and Celebration while she experienced her brief incarnation as a daughter, sister and niece. They succeeded. I know because at her funeral, Evvy's casket was dwarfed by her presence that remains so large within her family; she's probably in more family photos than my own boys are- and they've been around for a quarter century.

Paradox is easy- consciousness: is it quantum? dualistic? determined? free? soul? material? matter? energy? epiphenomena?

What is easily lost in the convenience of paradox, is ambiguity's torture.

For us who are called into Human Being, we live daily with something that no other species encounters: Ambiguity. I would argue that it's infinitely easier to collapse an ambiguity into simple contradictions and fight over which sides are superior; the more difficult road I would continue to argue, entails holding a contradictory tension until you can find a higher unifying logic- thus transforming such tension into the pleasure that can only come from paradox: reaching a paradox is climatic.

Of the three, the road less traveled is Ambiguity. Losing a child can't be packed away into contradiction or a paradox: the same qualities that let Human Being into the world of Awe, let us into the world of Terror- where sometimes trucks come from nowhere, and sometimes come from a long way off: either way we hear its rumble... it's just a matter of how long we have in listening to its rumble.

Contradiction only requires cunning; paradox requires deep thoughtfulness; Ambiguity demands all that we have. That's why it takes Love to live in it: That's why- of the three roads- it's the least traveled.

Love has the muscle to rise above Ambiguity's torture. Love can't exist in a vacuum though, it needs embodiment; and more, it can't exist within a body itself, it can only exist in the spaces between Bodies: between Evvy and her Mother's breast; her Father's fierce protection; her siblings' camaraderie: Beyond these closest of confines stands her Wall of Love that is founded on her Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles and Cousins. It's Love that sees us into this world, and it's Love that sees us out. It's the road between, with its constant threat of ambiguity, that often scares us off it; soon we acclimate to fear and its myriad of expressions that stem from desperation instead of an inner fullness.

So in the end, there is in actuality only one road. However, it's how we choose to walk it, that determines where the road will lead; it's destination is relative to what happens in the spaces between us. Hopefully, we can fill the spaces between us the way Sara and Matt filled Evvy's space.

Why I Believe in a God that Doesn't Exist

2010-02-26T07:54:00.003-06:00

Do I believe in God? Yes.

Can I define the nature of God? No.

Does God exist? No.

Do I believe in my computer? Yes.

Does my computer exist? Yes.

An odd group of questions wouldn't you say? As odd as this group is, working through these questions will actually help us make more sense of being human, spirituality, science and even our ideas of God. Since we've been considering the idea of faith, lets begin with my believing in the computer I'm writing this post on.

By now it should be obvious to you that I believe in my computer. If I didn't, I wouldn't be writing on it. Now, does my belief- or faith- in my computer, have anything to do with making it real or unreal? No- right? However, because this computer is thus far credible to me, I believe in it to a level where I'm willing to type my thoughts here and send them to you for your analysis; if I didn't believe, (or have faith) in my computer, I'd have to find another computer that demonstrated enough credibility, to garner the belief necessary to write on it.

What about my computer existing? Let me just say here that we're safe to infer the obvious. Besides, it's not late enough, and nor are we in a bar together.

So now I hope you're wondering how I can believe in God if I at the same time assert that God does not exist! And if we were indeed at that bar together, I'd answer with the best Bill Clinton I could muster, "well, it depends on what your definition of "exist" is." Refreshing myself with a sip, I'd go on to explain that the etymology of the word exist, gets at the idea of standing out from. (As a side note, and by way of explaining what I mean with out going down a path that deserves a hike, just not now- you could say that a huge herd of people try out for American Idol; only those that stand out in specific ways will get a chance to win: to stand out the most. The question for later, centers on asking if this standout contestant also exists more than the herd from which he exists- or stands out?)

Are you getting the picture? God does not exist because God does not stand out: any consideration of God's nature, has to begin with understanding that existence is a standing out, and as such, any "God" that stands out is not yet God, but just another existent thing. God that is any God at all, will be that from which existence stands out. In other words, that which God stands out from, is God. In the parlance of Christian language, any God that exists is an idol.

Oops, it looks like I just defined God. It looks that way but I don't think I did. All I pointed to was what God couldn't be- an idol. This is important to understand, because usually, when we've entered into faith through God, God becomes the ground of our world; here we're apt to take our ability to form nouns seriously: what are nouns? persons, places or things (or ideas); in other words, things that exist. And as I'm trying to show you, idols instead of God combined with certainty instead of faith, make for an explosive concoction in the making of our personal ground.

Earlier in past commentary, Stephen told of his working out the synthesizing of his Christian faith and his Science faith. We're building the ground to do that work; not only to solve dissonance, but to recognize that by doing so, we'll be closer to filling out the Human Being that is here to Exist.

Yes Virginia, there is a God who doesn't exist.

Physics and Sophistication

2010-02-25T09:19:00.004-06:00

In my profile at right, I claimed that in my thinking, my concerns are both theoretical AND practical. Perhaps it's time for some practicality and watch faith in action.

What is more real, a gun or an idea? If a gun is so much more real, why do we often freak out when certain ideas of ours are somehow challenged- a freak out, which if you measured it by means of MRI and the like, would look exactly like one experienced, when someone points a loaded gun at you? Science, which is at heart physics, has made a comfortable world to live in. What I mean, is not only are we more comfortable in nature, in terms of houses, central heat, computers and etc., our worlds too, have become simpler as we've become accustomed to conceiving ourselves as objects in space bumping one another. Science has provided a framework in which guns and cameras are real, as well as assuring us, that the images a photographer captures on paper is not someone's soul...this is sophistication.

Yet, the most sophisticated organism to have ever existed, lives from something we call ideas- "things" which can't be seen directly by any means we would call empirical.

Physics, capital P, is a framework of understanding reality. It began with Newton and his laws of objects and motion, and the rest of science builds upon this mentality. Whether science is hard- chemistry, biology and physics (small p), or soft, psychology, sociology and economics- the mentality is built on the same logic of bodies interacting through law like motion with other bodies. This mentality easily makes sense of guns and bullets; this mentality has a difficult time making sense of ideas and meaning; this mentality is the ground of our shared world, which is our culture: which as world, doesn't exist like nature, where there, Physics can make perfect and accurate sense of things.

World is not nature: Most often, when you interact with people, do you do so on a basis that is World, or on a basis that is Nature? In world, ideas can be as real as guns because we're not just bodies acted on by forces; we are also bodies who share spaces with one another who respond to meaning. Remember how we talked about worlds needing world views to take the place of "a ground to walk on"? (Which in nature comes to us ready made?) This "soil" which we all must make and then use to form each of our individual ground, is comprised of stuff that is meaning-full to us. In this case, what kind of "Physics" do we have to understand the reality of Meaning, that will not just let meaning feel as real as any physical object, but let meaning be just as real on its own terms, instead of only being considered as something merely decorative to the physical?

I promised practical. Recount those times in your life when you've shared in the discussion of ideas. It could be a meeting at the office, on the street, in a church, at a coffee shop or a bar; maybe even at a "Tea Party." More likely than not, someone in such a meeting reacted like a stirred hornet's nest: this person just experienced a gun being pointed at him. He can no longer participate in the exploration of ideas, because the ideas from which he grounds himself are felt in jeopardy. All the fight and flight mechanisms that are there for us to employ in the face of threat are brought to bare in a conversation...where no guns are present.

So what is sophistication? And what can Physics even say about it?

Innocence and Experience

2010-02-24T08:50:00.008-06:00

Who are you? When I ask my Golden Retriever, Sam, that question, the only answer I get from him is his typical smile and gleam that make him look like he's waking up to Christmas morning- for the eighth time today! Let's go back to you though: If you were to rewind what played out in your mind in the brief time it took you to read my account of Sam, what will you see? What ever its contents, you probably experienced something akin to a bb's impact of a windshield where its impact sets off a random crazing; each line zig-zagging you through holidays, pets, adjacent meanings and maybe even a new connection of insight. Unpacking your moment in this way, shows you that these moments exist like genes: unraveled, they're thousands of times bigger! Welcome to World; and like Dorothy you're not in Kansas any more.

That is to say, you don't just exist in environment any more. Put into the poetic language of Genesis and the Garden of Eden, my dog Sam still lives in the Garden: I don't. And neither do you. Sam inhabits a place of Innocence. Ours is the place of Experience.

So what is this place that we inhabit? Why have we thought of our place as a fallen one? Why is Experience so difficult compared to Innocence? What do these questions have to do with physics, quantum or otherwise? Why does the Canada Goose, though gliding along water- moments from ice, under grey skies bombarding it with sleet, make its existence of dunking its head for green bits, make life look so easy? Why can't we, no matter how hard we try, revert to the way-of-being exemplified by a simple goose? Why can't we, now that we have World, go back to Nature?

Composing thousands of years ago, before writing came into existence, the poets behind the Garden story, told of the gates which bar human kind from returning to the garden, as being guarded by God's servants with flaming swords. Re-entry, no matter how desolate we feel in our "expulsion", is for ever out of the question. In a very real way, when I pet Sam, I'm reaching through steel bars when I do so. He lives in a realm of Innocence; You and I live in the realm of Experience.

We can't let words like God and Evolution detract us from the real issue at hand: we live through World and we can't go back to living through Nature; that is, we can't go back to the life of Sam or Canada Geese. Like it or not, we are stuck in Experience, and any attempt out of it by way of escaping into Innocence is for ever barred.

If we are to understand what it is to ultimately be Human, we have to grasp what it is to live in Experience- through World and not Nature. You are not an object, you are a world: the bb's impact shows you that. This world-ness of our existence is full of implications that cannot be mastered or even understood by forms of measurement- the language of science. We have to employ the methods of the Poet as well.

So we haven't left our discussion of Faith; we are only bringing into the spotlight, the context of our Human Complexity to better understand how Faith fits into the life of Experience.

What are your thoughts so far?

FaithVI: Environment and World

2010-02-22T07:45:00.008-06:00

So far, I've talked about faith dramatically in terms of high wires and Niagara Falls, and mundanely in terms of driving, and executing a beer run. In each case, I'm trying to show you that faith is uniquely human and stems from the genius involved in being human; a genius not of our own making, a genius not present in the Canada goose, a genius that forms the basis of human difficulty: having to live in a realm that technically, is not environmental, and is one of our own choosing.

For sake of discussion, I want to use word environment to designate specifically the realm in which an organism exchanges energy for the purpose of supporting its physicality. Here we can talk about organisms and ecosystems, whether they be grizzly's and Alaskan rivers, or bacteria and petri-dishes or our gut, analyzing the health of a system entails studying the interactions of bodies and environment and assessing their fitness. And because we humans share in having bodies that have to connect to environment, we our selves fall under such analysis. And under such analysis, one of the things we notice is that bodies have innate systems that orient them to the environment, one such system being sight and horizon lines.

Most of the living for Human Being though, doesn't transpire through environment it transpires through world. World, for sake of discussion, is different than environment; at its heart, there is no physicality to it. If I give you two apples, mathematically and environmentally speaking, I gave you two objects of nutrition. From the point of view of world, only you will know what this means; maybe for you, it's not about nutrition, or the number two. Maybe for you in this moment, it's about kindness which you haven't experienced in a long while; in this case you could say that I didn't give you two apples, what I actually gave you was a glass of cold water to alleviate something parched. So what was parched? If we employed a moisture meter would we be able to measure how parched you are?

Are you feeling the difference between world and environment? It's not that world and environment are separate- they're not. But just because they're not separate doesn't mean they're not different. A large part of living into our human complexity, is to understand what this difference entails for us humans.

Maybe the largest difference between world and environment, is that world doesn't come with ready made orientation systems like sight and horizon lines. Yet our need for orientation in world, is needed every bit as much as it is in environment. So what is the orientation system in world, where there are no horizon lines, no established up and down and infinity in all directions?

Well at the heart of it all, we need to recognize, that in place of any horizon lines providing perpendicularity, or gravity providing connection, we have world-views: a network of ideas about a reality that consists as both environment and world; a network of ideas in which we are willing to believe in, in order to orient our selves into a felt sense of place. Just because ideas lack the physicality of balls and ramps, or electrons and double slit experiments, doesn't make the idea less "tangible". Only those ideas that to us feel credible, can become the ideas we will come to believe and make into the ground of our world; such grounding can center on "brand name consuming", professional sub cultures, science sub-cultures, religious subcultures, and maybe even God (or not-God): No matter your ground- because it consists of ideas that you weave into your world-view, that you have to decide for yourself which to employ- your ground can ultimately be called your Faith.

Faith V: Quest, Question, and Beer.

2010-02-21T07:41:00.011-06:00

"I believe in our innate capacity to believe; no other species seems to have this capacity." I could also write this sentence in another way to mean exactly the same thing: "I have faith in our innate capacity to believe; no other species seems to have this capacity." How are these two sentences synonymous?

I said in the last post that the words faith and believe are inexorably linked and this is how: faith is a noun form, and believe is a verb form of the same experience. So- do you believe your trip to the store will succeed? Of course- you wouldn't even get into the car if you didn't- you're an intelligent person after all. But watch this- I can write the exact same question which will only be different in aesthetics: "Do you have faith that your trip to the store will succeed?" (and then go on to state my belief in your intelligence).... At this point, you can see that this question of my belief- a past predicate, my believing- a gerund, and my faith- a noun, in the intelligence of you the reader, hinges on whether the proposition of you the reader being intelligent, is a credible one or not. (Believe me, the reality that you're intelligent is credible indeed! So I have faith in you.)

This inexorable link of faith and believe is seen more apparently when you begin with the original Greek words, which we translate into the modern words faith and believe: Pistis and Pistewo. When ever you are reading through a New Testament Text, and you come across our word faith, you are reading the underlying Greek noun, Pistis. And when you come across our word believe, you are reading the underlying Greek verb, Pistewo. At the heart of this word group, is living into, and I would add- living into through question.

No other species, I believe, is forced into living by question. The Canada goose certainly lives it's life through a quest, but these are quests of biology and environment; its satisfaction depends on its body remaining warm while gliding along November ponds and blithely dunking its head for bits. (You could probably sum up the life of our goose by Thermodynamics.)

To live through question is entirely different than living through quest. In fact, you could say that understanding such difference is imperative to understanding Human Being. The mundane task of driving to the store begins as a quest for something like beer, but is innately involved in question and faith. (I'm purposely talking about faith in such a mundane scale because, unless we can get a felt sense of it here at this scale, we won't be able interact with faith at ultimate scales without getting unwieldy).

So looking at faith in this mundane scale of a quest for beer, what are we to consider of it?

Well, faith is about living into; and because this happens through question besides biological quest, the idea of completing your beer run has to be credible to you. Faith requires credibility.

But, even though, completing a beer run may be sufficiently credible, until you actually get in the car and go, your faith will not be energized. Faith requires coherent action.

A crisis of faith is a symptom and not a cause: to try to whip up more faith is to only address symptoms. The underlying cause comes from needing to live into a world by way of question and not having a credible "vehicle" in which to make that trip: A person who feels their suffering as a lack of faith, is encountering an issue of credibility.

The question often posed in our context is, "whats the relationship of faith to reason?" as if they are two separate pathways, one being inferior. I hope you're beginning to see that reason is involved in faith but exists as a whole other genus or kind etc.; while you're driving the car you better be using the full faculty of reason. But it's faith that gets you into the car and onto the road with all the other cars, so you can fulfill your quest for some cold ones.

Faith IV: The Flexibility of Believing

2010-02-18T09:51:00.010-06:00

I think in terms of commitment as well as in terms of faith or belief, all three are bludgeons when faced with the complexities that we try to negotiate with language. I'm more moved these days by story telling than by the reduction of experience to abstraction. In Physics, supposedly simple equations such as the T-shirtable Maxwell's or Einstein's field equations rest on essential wildernesses of experiment and theory, which Physicists know by anecdote and fable as much as from books and personal experience. I think it's the same with these supposedly simple words, which need all human experience to be known intimately. In the end, however, what we give transcends what we know and what we feel, our belief and our faith.

Peter Morgan.

...Theory shares the same Latin root from which we get the word theater (or theatre). Theories then are insights, and as such, aren't true or untrue, rather they let us see into a thing. A new theory doesn't necessarily replace another one, it lets us see differently.

David Bohm; my paraphrase.

I began this foray into faith in response to commentary developing over at 13.7 in the context of science and religion, where a scientist asked, how can he a man of reason, interact with someone like me, a man of "faith"? So I began this continuing exploration of faith by getting at where I think science gets the concept wrong. Here, I'd like to approach it from where I think Christians get it wrong, by comparing faith to certainty- all awhile keeping the admonitions of our two thinkers heading this post in mind.

To begin, let me say that faith is inexorably tied to believe. So what is believe about?

Imagine yourself at home. If you're a young person- pre-family, you have the munchies; if on the other hand, you're intra-family, you need milk; in either case you gotta get in the car and drive to the store. Such a trip is so practiced, driving requires little thought, and you never question returning home safely; i.e. you never bid fond farewells to your loved ones before embarking to the Quicky Mart.

But think about it- how can you know with certainty that you will return safely, until your safety is history? You can't. Do you believe that you'll return safely? well yes- if you didn't believe it you wouldn't go. I'm stating something simply, but don't let that fool you! Such simplicity is really quite complex as it relies on infrastructure, machinery, stability, practice, and trust in other drivers: and because certainty is an impossibility in situations such as this, we wear seat belts. This is a classic situation requiring our faculty of believing: Believing is an elegant way to live into circumstances where no amount of information can solve a total amount of ignorance or fixate a probability.

Let's compare this to certainty. Grammatically speaking, certainty is innately binary; you can be certain or uncertain. If you want to approach the driving scenario within the framework of certainty, then the consistent thing to do is to leave off your seat belt: why bother with any discomfort- go "commando" and feel free and easy because it's certain you'll return safely. The very basis of believing on the other hand, has its genesis in ignorance: whether the situation is driving to the store, entering into marriage, or picking a career, each situation comes with a boat load of ignorance that we have to live our lives into. In actuality, believing is a robust capacity for living with such innate ignorance.

When it comes to God, Christians often mistake believing for certainty. Because certainty requires a fixed knowledge set, any change to a knowledge set of God, equates to a change in their God; a sense of peril ensues which typically sets off a hornet's nest in the middle of any dialog about God. (Or scientific theory or anything else that stands for turf.)

When you approach God through believing though, you begin with an acknowledged ignorance: so your trust is built on something different than what garners certainty. And without the innate rigidity of certainty- which depends on my concept remaining true, regardless of new information- believing lets God be God regardless of my theology. Believing sets me up to participate with God instead of needing to control who God is.

So when Stephen thinks about God in other terms such as Beauty or Elegance, we are invited to experience God in other ways, because through our capacity of believing, our connection is about God rather than fixed concepts.

Faith P.III: Residency

2010-02-16T08:24:00.008-06:00

Seeking faith is a dangerous pursuit. How much easier it is to wile away the hours in fashionable cynicism for example; all one needs to do is swirl a wine glass correctly, poise their nose in professional whiffing, and adroitly toss about aromatic taxonomy: alcohol is only but one ingredient in the making of our daily need for stupor.

You may be detecting a note of sarcasm here; hmm... so do I! It may surprise you though, when you hear me defend our need for "stupor." Indeed the tight rope on which we're asked to walk (just by fact of being human) stretches across an infinite cosmos- not just Niagara Falls-which in comparison, is hardly even a bathtub. No- my blade of sarcasm is wielded to those who would sell faith like a used car, or a magic tonic; equally so against those, who from fashioned luxury boxes, make sport of people in the arena trying to make the wine. In either case, what they share in common, is that they lead you to believe that they themselves are on the wire, when in reality, they are every bit at cliff side, as any other Niagara Falls tourist.

Understanding the true nature of faith is important- why? Because life on the wire is very different than life lived cliff side due to some lack of trust- a deep abiding trust in this something you can't see, yet you embody. Without this thing that I'm referring to as faith, your experience of life in the Cosmos will only be a partial one; perhaps like a marriage of convenience where a couple live satisfactorily as roommates while forgoing the pleasure of living as lovers.

Faith is complex: as is Human Being. I realize that by furthering our trapezing into a field of metaphors, I may be adding to the confusion, and this may be necessary to get to our clearing. For now, I hope you can see that the concept of faith involves something more than logic or epistemology or even religion. It has to do with the character of residence one experiences as they live, not only as an animal which is only asked to live in its environment, but as Human Being- who is asked to live in the Cosmos by this innate but strange ability to relate intimately with its vastness.

Getting Faith Right. Part Two.

2010-02-14T09:23:00.004-06:00

It was the during the 70's, the decade of bell-bottoms and Disco, (wore those, avoided that) when the word faith became a euphemism for religion. The intention behind this cultural move grew out of recognizing that not all people involved in faith were involved in any particular religion; many people were just spiritual. It was a proper intention, but something germane to the concept of faith was lost; and something innate to being human, something so complex and rich, has become even more obscured in our time.

Because faith is such a complexity, it will require us to approach it with complexity- to look at it from different angles and different analogies; to bring our full intelligence and patience; to consider new possibilities of what it means to be religious, not on a basis of a religion, but on a basis of our being Human, which is something that exists"on top" of being mammalian.

I felt so much distress reading in the comment section under "Getting Faith Right Part One" in learning of Robert's friend. I felt so much excitement though in reading the thoughtfulness of Peter Morgan's and Robert's insights. It's insights such as these that allow us poke and prod at the concept of faith, and clear a path from an abstraction back to its underlying experience.

Let me end this post on a word about analogies that I learned from my professor Dr. George Gianoulus from whom I learned Greek and hermeneutics. He was adamant in saying that any attempt to interpret the Biblical text literally, can only be done if one first understands the text literarily. Which meant we had to become versed in figures of speech. When it came to analogies this was his advice: "Think of analogies like four legged tables of which one of its legs is short; trying to make it stable on all four legs will only lead to frustration- letting it be stable on the three legs however, lets the table work fine."

This advise will serve us well as we poke and prod together.

Robert's Friend And Our Human Notes

2010-02-10T11:15:00.009-06:00

In the comment section under the previous post, I learned that Robert lost his friend; a friend who encountered suffering so acutely, that ending his life felt more viable than living.

Perhaps this would be an appropriate time for me to take a moment to clarify what this blog is about, and why I'm here writing and hoping to engender a dialog with you.

I have found the life of being human, utterly profound. For whatever reason, or however it came about, it seems that I've always been able to see through the "apparent" into what we might call, the True and Real: that level of reality that can't be reduced to algorithms or dogma, but which we try to approach with concepts like Beauty, Elegance, Love, Life and God. I'm not claiming any special intelligence or privilege to some secret knowledge (I don't have either); basically put- like you, I live with an inclination that shapes one's pursuits. While your's might be in the field of science or business or theater and the like- my inclination has pushed me toward comprehending the experience of being human beyond our immediate contexts of a culture: I seek to comprehend our being human in the context of the Cosmos itself.

I admitted to a lack of any special intelligence. Maybe if I had some, I could write more brilliantly and precisely toward the Profundity I so readily see. Or maybe the problem lies in the Profundity: there seems to be something innate to it that escapes- even squirts- out of any grasp that aims to "contain" or "bottle" it; Profundity eludes even the looser grasps of the statistical mechanics chemists use to navigate an environment at the quantum level.

The Profundity I see, begs us to leave the frameworks of physics and enter into, once again, the frameworks of the poetic: not to replace the physic but to take a place along side it.

Physics counts on the power to denote. Poetics on the other hand, rely on the power to connote. We need this power of connotation, not because we lack some aptitude, we need it because there are fields of reality that disappear or are distorted by the act denoting them. Often times, these are the things that exist beyond our grasp of formula- like Beauty. Like Human Being.

By chance, in joining a group of new acquaintances for some beers last year, I was seated across from a composer. I learned something interesting from him that I think fits here: he explained to me that were it not for something called "overtones," a note of C would sound the same regardless of the instrument; it's the properties of overtones that lets a denoted C sound like a violin.

What is the reality of Physic's concept of entanglement? I read Robert's report, not knowing either Robert or his friend; I've had to fight back tears as I encountered Profundity through Robert, who I only knew existed since this morning after reading his comment. And once more, though I don't know Robert's friend, I am convinced that his suffering could never be denoted; not even by himself. Our sufferings and our joys are encountered in the connotations- the overtones that make each of us sound so unique to each other.

In developing together, our sense of what it is to be religious then, we have to be committed to making a place for the Poetic: the Profundity accessible to human intelligence by way of Grace-instead of by ways which can be rendered by dogma, or any other attempt to reduce being human, to formulas that can only denote.

Getting Faith Right. Part One.

2010-02-09T12:46:00.007-06:00

"I'm a Scientist! I don't rely on despair; I rely on knowledge!" - Does this sentence make any sense to you? Why not? It's because despair is a state of being; it's not about epistemology. Who would ever think about despair as a method for knowing? Yet the common "battle cry" of those who consider themselves hard minded is, "I'm a scientist! I don't rely on faith; I rely on knowledge! Faith, like despair, is a state of being. Again- how can a being state be considered a method for knowing?

Being states are complex and large; they involve mood and attitude and memory and experience and methods of knowing- like reason. Being states will condition our knowing, but they are not the methods themselves. Faith as such a complexity, is not specific to religion. And for that matter, is not specific to literature, economics, professional sports or even science. Faith is specific to any being who has an I-self, subject-object, past-future level of consciousness: in other words, faith is specific to human being, who on the basis of evolved biology, neo-cortex's and the like, act from a real capacity to be subjective. Compare this to the Canada goose; how much thought does a Canada goose put into being a Canada goose? How about you? Has your life been characterized by such biological automation? If you didn't believe in science, would you be a scientist? Or do you consider your act of becoming a scientist something as automatic as a Canada goose existing as a Canada goose?

You're comfortable with the concept believe, as in "I believe in the scientific method"; you can think of faith as a noun form of the verb form, believe. "I believe" is synonymous with the structure, "I have faith." "I have faith in the scientific method"; or on a bad day, you might say, "I despair of the scientific method."

Faith is a complex idea and warrants another viewing angle.

It's the time of Boltzmann and Darwin. The Niagara Falls were a summer vacation mecca where tight-rope walkers would stretch wires across chasms, and at 4:oo p.m., would perform their amazing feats of balance for tourists who would congregate along the fall's edges and watch a thrilling show (historically true). Imagine then, an acrobat having wowed the crowds on his wire, came shore side, grabbed a wheel barrow from his pile of props, rolled it up to you and asked, "do you believe that I can roll this across the falls without falling?" You reply "why yes fine sir! I do declare that you are the finest tight rope acrobat in all the world!" He says, "well then- hop in."

The acrobat could have also asked his question to you this way: "do you have the faith that I can roll"...and you would be faced with the same situation of having to decide how much faith you're willing to enter into, for the sake of a wheel barrow ride.

Faith can't make anything true or false, real or unreal. Kierkegaard talked about his leap of faith as a leap from a cliff into the abyss. The abyss is Mystery. And having known all the things around him that he could see, Kierkegaard was convinced that Life existed not in the constructs around him, but in the Abyss- and leaped for it. He saw his wheel barrow in Mystery.

Now- knowing how and where to find a wheel barrow is a different kind of question.

Fidelity and Nuclear Fear

2010-02-08T08:24:00.006-06:00

I've never "known more" in my life than I did when I was in my early twenties and an evangelical, non-denominational, non-religious, unadulterated Christian. Luckily, how ever it came about, I strove to always be willing to let God be God; which caused me to learn that God doesn't always show up like "God". Which brings me to the point of this post: Fidelity. I didn't grow up churched. My attraction to Christ was something organic; his life gave form to my own felt experience of what life is all about. In college, I found the evangelical expression suiting my sense of fidelity and jumped in.

Let me just say something for the moment: we consider nuclear energy to be the most potent; and the nuclear bomb to be the most destructive. I would argue that even more powerful is Human Being. And one of the more powerful forces, even nuclear in nature is fidelity: as a "strong force" it's involved in the holding together of all the particular aspects that make up the "selves" we feel ourselves to be. So when we encounter something that looks to threaten our fidelity, the threat involves a loosening of a "something", that feels crucial to the holding our "nucleus" intact; and knowing what chain of events a disintegrating nucleus can begin, we work to ward off such triggering threats.

That said- as I got into my thirties, this is one thing I learned: The Christianity in which I trafficked valued fidelity with "God" and summed all the problems of the world, up to a lack of fidelity to "the truth". What they failed to realize however, was that they didn't have a corner on "truth" nor did they hold it on fidelity. I found plenty of non-Christian people who with "all their heart minds and souls" were seeking not just "the truth", but more importantly, a human presence in this world that could be called truly generative. Ironically, people who weren't part of Christianity, were acting in the way of Christ more than Christians themselves, who for the most part, were only interested in "treading water" while living in "this crappy place" until they could get to the "good place"- Heaven. I didn't see Christ in this Christianity: however, the fidelity that Christ exhibited, was the fidelity to which I aspired.

In the context of my experience in religion, I have raised the issue of fidelity and involved it metaphorically with the strong nuclear force. But the metaphor extends to other contexts- even science. I think the physicist, Peter Morgan wrote well about our difficulty of fidelity under the last post, and I'd like to quote a paragraph here:

"With the increased complexity of our varied allegiances, it is difficult to be part of different groups. The commitments required in some churches are surely incompatible with the commitments required in some Physics departments. If one has a passion for a number of things, finding mutually compatible groups in which to exercise all of them fully may be very difficult. It may require moving to a different country to find a place where varied ideas can be pursued together in ways that are more-or-less compatible."

What I see through Christ's insights, is that fidelity entails fidelity to Life more than fidelity to forms; and that the essence of "idolatry" is adhering to a form instead of Life: even if the form goes by the name of Christianity. I wonder- how much of our incompatibility stems from our fidelity to forms over and above fidelity to life?

If we are to remodel what it is to be religious, it must be a place where all inquiry is supported, and Trueness is prized more than "the truth" as we seek to understand our lives of being human in this Life.

2010-02-06T09:54:00.006-06:00

My inclination, has been to repel a religious sense of things; it's just felt too "religiony" for my taste. And yet, I have an experience with Life that I'm comfortable putting in a context of God, and I'm drawn intimately to Jesus' historical life. So a lot of my thinking over the last few years, was carried out under this idea: "If we could take Jesus' insights as well as other biblical insights, and remove them from a religious context, would they make even more sense?" For me, I saw "religion-icity" itself as a distorting factor: I recognized the elegance in life that can only emerge from complexity; I saw Jesus embodying that elegance; I saw so much of Christianity focused on maintaining a simplistic world view: Christianity made itself sure of a formula, but lost elegance.

But. It's not that easy. It turns out that we need context. Without some framework of some kind to give order to all the parts we encounter on a daily basis, we feel confused- if not lost.

I'm talking big-context here. We all belong to particular contexts in terms of families or professions or hobbies and the like. Still, we seek a framework that can give over-all context to our daily contexts. Science has fit a bill here. Because human life can be singly expressed in forms of the technological, Science is in a unique position to serve as big-context. Science isn't concerned with subjective experience and neither is the technological sense of life. In a "technological" world, business is something that centers on ideas of efficiency and machine metaphors; the idea that a business could be a place for us to create "soul" and meaningful lives feels new-age and soft to the "technocrat".

I think we're growing weary of life experienced so singly in the techno-consumer context, as well as recognizing that there's more to being human than meets the "scientific eye". There is something vitally important in our subjective experiencing that needs a proper voice again: a voice and place as credible as technology. To fit this bill, we need a concept as big as science and the only one that I can think of is the one of being religious: But we can't use it as is, we have to remodel it; our sense of being religious comes from developments that found their genesis in a whole other cosmology than what we know to exist today.

Over the next few posts, I'd like for us to develop this idea and see if we can find something useful.

Newton can get us to the moon, but can't make a world

2010-02-03T08:25:00.010-06:00

Look around you, find something to focus on for a moment and come back to the page... when you did this, did you notice your eye balls? We usually don't. Notice the reading your doing right now, does the activity feel like its transpiring at your eye sockets or further back in your head? So let me ask you, we normally associate seeing with eyeballs, but in your experience, are you seeing with your eyes, or are you seeing by way of your thinking?

It was about fifteen years ago now when I came across a thinker whom I've grown fond of named James Hillman. Though rooted in the Jungian school of psychology, he's quite critical of his profession when ever it seeks to turn one's making of "psyche" -Greek for "soul"- into an administrative task rather than a living one. (No wonder I like him!) But anyway, I was reading him one evening and he said this: "we don't see with our eyes, we see with our ideas." Reading that line opened my eyes! "But wait a minute- your eyes were already opened. You can't read with your eyes closed!" I know- thats what I'm trying to get at. Hillman gave me a new idea about ideas and seeing; and I've looked at the world differently ever since!

Enter Newton- and why I'm writing under the matrix of complexity.

The ideas we see through, feel private to us. But in fact, they are part and parcel with the ideas that we develop publicly: we call this culture. And just as you didn't notice your eyeballs as you scanned about the room, you rarely notice the cultural ideas (your "eyes") as you make sense of the reality bubbling about us. In this case, I would offer that one of our foundational cultural ideas through which we expect reality to conform to, is the long held scientific idea that all things in the universe can explained by Newton's three laws of motion: the physics bound in the game of billiards- simple balls; simple bumps; simple geometry.

Scientists have been leaving the world of Newton for awhile as they recognize that the world is much more complex than a moon shot- even at the cellular level and below. In fact a growing branch of science refers to itself as the science of Complexity and was born from realizing things like the "butterfly effect", which point to patterns of cause and effect that can't be simply traced: it's a realization that reality is requiring us to see it differently.

The thing is, individuals are nimble, cultures are not. Changing our sense of culture based reality is hard work. But cultures aren't monoliths that happen as mountains do, they emerge from individuals -you and me and all of us- bunching up with ideas through which to see and make a world together.

Some fundamental questions we have to ask ourselves are, what is it that we want to see? what are we looking for? and what can we see? "We Are The World" is more than a title of a song to raise funds for places suffering destitution: it's a complex idea of human reality.

My brief travelogue into complexity

2010-02-02T07:48:00.012-06:00

By cultural standards you could say that I'm a weird man. Not in any creepy way- you'd think me quite congenial. "But there's a story arc; and that for anyone who's serious and adept, they should fit into it" you'd say, and wonder why I don't. Perhaps you'd think of me as a gad fly, a dilettante even, as you try to understand why such a congenial and decent fellow such as myself hasn't fulfilled the proper story of career and acquiring. Well, without feeling any offense from you- after all, culture is our invisible structure of reality, I would begin my answer to you, "it's complex..." and assure you that while I've been involved in different worlds of work, one thing that I have not been, is a dilettante.

Actually, I'm a serious man. At about the age of twenty, I came across a prayer offered by Solomon, who in a moment like finding a genie's lamp (but only getting one wish) didn't ask for wealth but instead asked for wisdom. For what ever reason, that prayer sucked me in. Totally. You see dilettantes don't seek wisdom, they flit from it. My moving from a work world to another didn't entail from flitting flights but from needing to raise my two sons as a single parent and making a world where I could not only tend to my job, but tend to them as well.

So with my one wish I asked for wisdom; thinking that like manna, it was going to simply rain down on me from heaven. Instead, what I got were questions and whiffs. Often times, the questions led me into intellectual thickets and bramble- deeper into the valley and away from the peaks; honest questions have a way of doing that. But what was so cool was that even in those times when the thickets tangle and the valley's shadow conspired to keep me in their grasp, there was always a whiff for me to catch, and following it led me into new clearings and new vistas. And, of course, we all know- that along with new vistas come new questions!

There isn't any one formula for wisdom to show up and I certainly haven't bottled it; it's only now that I can look back and see a pattern. If you were to ask me where I was going even five years ago I wouldn't have been able to say. Outwardly I would stammer off some ideas, but inwardly I was saying clearly, "I don't know, but I'm following this scent and somehow I trust it."

Following those whiffs led me into worlds; and worlds are comprised of their minds and their culture. This means that in my lifetime, I've thought in the minds of art, theology, engineering, sales and marketing, psychology, spirituality, and in the large categories of mind: Dad, Business, Science and Religion. My prayer for wisdom led me into a bunch of minds other than my own native one. As a young artist, I considered science and business as containers for people who were too flaccid for the creative venture: Having lived in these minds, I realized first hand how utterly creative these "foreigners" really are.

Here's the take away I want you to have from this brief travelogue of my aspiration for wisdom: Human Being is in its very essence, a complexity- an amazing, confusing amalgamation of needs and expressions that are physical and spiritual; we have a need to be uniquely individual as well as to easily fit in; we want a place to be strong and effective and a place to be weak and recuperate. As difficult as it may be, to be endowed with all this complexity that is the Human life, we have to fight our tendency to reduce our living to a formula; whether those formulas come from economics, science or even religion.

We've been living through a time of formulas. But life is deliciously complex. Our time, is calling us into wisdom.

Freedom and Limits: the Creative Parodox

2009-12-10T12:00:00.021-06:00

The complexity embodied by a hand crafted tapestry points to a paradox found in creative power: the very act of creating is an act of establishing limits. Think about it- the tapestry maker limits herself to this scene and not that one; these colors and not those. She's also has to work within the limits of her time and her place; a time and place that had sophisticated colorants and materials- a time and place that evolved from her cave drawing ancestors. Without limits, nothing can be made let alone exist: without limits generic atoms can't form into proprietary molecules that event-ually make up dyes and thread.

But the highest form of freedom is to be unlimited isn't it? You'd think so but it's not. This is why I referred to it as a paradox within creative power. (Two things to clarify here: I'm using "creative power" in place of "creativity" because in our culture, creativity has been domesticated into an aptitude of being able to make crafty doo-dads. In reality, creativity is a deep power unique to Human Being ((and God)). Secondly, paradox simply put, is a contradictory structure that still works, but though it works, it just shouldn't oughtta be, it goes against our sense of things- para: outside of, dox: what is within our common sense of the world. In contrast to paradox then, orthodox is the way something fits rightly into our sense of things.) So if nothing can exist apart from limits, then freedom has to be about something other than being limit-less. If this be the case, then what would happen if we began to think of freedom, not as freedom from limits, but- going boldly into the creative paradox- we began to see freedom as our capacity and ability to interact with limits in a way that creates more creative power and prowess?

Case in point. In today's political environment, those on the far right have churned freedom into a frothy battle cry. And at the core of this battle cry is their blind worship of "free markets" in a way that demands a market place freed from limits; that any sort of limit only handcuffs the market. But what in our world could this actually mean if without limits, nothing can exist? Such blind cries make a lot of heat but little light- and ultimately, are probably more destructive than creative. A truly creative market place interacts skillfully with limits rather than trying to abolish them. A truly free market place, if it is to be truly free, has to be free from dogmatism- a belief in an idea regardless of its coherence to reality: such blind worship makes for gods that are incoherent to reality.

Another case in point. We are limited by our need for water; yet we're free to interact with this limit and we've done so brilliantly in the shape of modern plumbing. I read somewhere that about 90% of our health today doesn't stem from modern medicine but from modern plumbing: our ability to bring clean water in and remove our waste so efficiently has played the lead role in ridding the diseases that plagued the generations before us. Plumbing, as mundane as it seems, is a stellar example of our creative power provided by the life made from limits.

And while we're talking about limits in the context of water, what do we who are so adept with water do in the parts of our world where the limits posed by water and its lack threaten "our Other's" existence- let alone their well being?

Limits. Without them atoms remain generic hovering blobs- if that. With them, atoms get to participate in something as amazing as water. And if they become fortunate enough to participate in a human being such as yourself, they get to participate in a world that you, whether you like it or not, are helping create.

Tapestries and Velvet Elvises

2009-12-01T11:23:00.006-06:00

The etymology of the word complicate is very telling: it originates from the experience of a tapestry, both in the looking and the making. Contemplating a hand made tapestry or Persian rug, provides a lot of insight into what I'm trying to convey through my use of the concept of complexity in this blog.

Looking at a well made tapestry is a true wonder of complexity. The rich colors, remarkable details, and the complicated designs and themes, are all carried out without the use of Auto-Cad, industrial dyes or computer-numerically-controled (CNC) sewing machines. What a leap from our cave drawing in France some thousands of years ago. And of course, who can resist the urge to look at a tapestry's back side, thinking that we'll be able to see how such a piece of majesty is accomplished, only to see even further, just how complicated a tapestry truly is? Complexity in this case, doesn't lead to confusion, it leads to beauty and wonder.

Now, compare the tapestry displayed on the museum wall to the black-velvet paintings displayed outside an old dinjy white van parked on an abandoned street side lot (often sharing the space with a van selling gulf shrimp). We might fashionably gag and chide the brash colors made bold by their black fury canvas, but you have to admit that the images are quite striking- you turned your head and looked didn't you? I did and I still shudder.

So a black-velvet painting (bvp) is striking, but is it beautiful? Recognizing that a post modern thinker would strive to find a way in which to equate a bvp to a tapestry, I would say that the main difference between a tapestry and a bvp is a matter of complexity: a tapestry draws us into wonder and deep regard for the life we're involved in. A bvp on the other hand, lacks such complexity and can only briefly titalate. And as to our regard, the best it can solicit from us is our sense of kitsch.

I would ask here now, when you look around at the culture that we've made together, does it look more like an inspiring tapestry, or does it look more like something kitsch?

A Simple Distinction

2009-11-25T09:52:00.029-06:00

When we feel compelled to describe something in terms of beauty or elegance, simplicity is an integral part of the picture. So why would someone want to give relevance to complicated states? Is this person, myself in this case, merely being provocative or just kinda stupid?

No- at least not here. For instance, I'm all over science's reverence for Einstein's equation of e=mc2: a huge part of the cosmos is comprehended at profound levels by a few simple symbols and a bit of syntax. This equation is quintessential elegance, due in large part to its simplicity. And yet who truly understands mass (m)? that is, why should generic atoms with nothing to do but be atoms, congregate together to form proprietary molecules, whether they be the molecules of something inert like iron or something living like RNA? And if you were to see how much space there is in any actual atom, the last thing you'd expect is for anything that we consider solid to be possible: and there you are; a solid in the company of other solids, unconcerned about falling through what is at it's basic reality, an air chair. As a layman, I might paraphrase the equation to you this way- if the chair you're sitting on could somehow achieve the speed of light times the speed of light (c2, or 186,000 miles per second x 186,000 miles per second) then your chair would no longer be mass but would now be energy (e); so what are you ultimately sitting on- mass, that can be solid, or energy, that is non-solid?

Simply put, the chair you're sitting on is at one level, a complexity beyond any understanding to date. While at another level, that of our interface, (which in this case is your butt, not your face) the act of sitting is done with minimal thought. Elegance.

So I'm all for simple when it's born of elegance. The problem occurs however, when we don't distinguish between the simple that arises from elegance (or beauty) and the simple that stems from reductionism. When arising from elegance, simple is about clarity; it allows us to see into the complexity even if we can't understand it: e=mc2 exemplifies this as we live in the reality depicted by this equation on a daily basis without understanding how atoms, things that are mostly space, can en mass to a level of a solid which then can be made into something like a chair to hold your own (m)ass.

Simple derived from a reductionist approach is different though. Reductionism is our way of reducing a complex whole to some of its basic parts that we can easily fit into our hands. Reducing a whole's innate complexity this way can be useful and even necessary as it makes something easy to hold and manipulate. But the danger that's always lurking along with its usefulness is this: we think we grasp the whole of a thing clearly, when in reality, we're only seeing the parts we can put into our grasp and fooling ourselves into believing that those few parts are the whole of it. The danger of this false simplicity is that it can actually obscure our vision without seeing our hand made reduction of view; kinda like making a set of custom blinders: only in this case not to protect a horse from getting spooked, but to protect ourselves from getting spooked.

So how do we let Life be its normal thriving complexity without getting spooked? I would offer, that in our culture, the reality that suffers so much from our reductionist made obscurity- the blinders we make for ourselves- is the reality of our Humanness. I've been to the farther reaches of Humanness: the distances that typically scare us by their impending spookiness. In light of our culture who's world view is basically composed from Newton's three laws of motion, our farther reaches are indeed spooky; but then, from such a simplistic world view, anything beyond a billiard game is considered spooky. If however, you consider our Humanness in a context more basic yet more profound than Newtonian physics- that of pure nothingness- the existence of a mere generic atom is itself, extra-ordinary. So what are we afraid of- we're not spooked by atoms and the mass they engender, so why should we be spooked by our Humanness?

As I said, I've been to the farther reaches of our Humanness and this is what I see: Elegance. And I gotta say, going in without the blinders on is exhilarating.

Our Human Complexity (Intro)

2009-11-18T09:46:00.009-06:00

Life is hard. Scott Peck, the well known psychiatrist and thinker of human spirituality opened his seminal book, The Road Less Travelled, with this piece of granite composed of only three words. He went on to argue from there, that our failing to understand the impact of this idea leads us into personal suffering of all sorts; so coming to terms with it then, begins our way out of suffering.

I read his book over twenty years ago and have appreciated Peck's thinking of our human experience ever since. But twenty plus years later, I’m disagreeing with his idea; not the whole idea though, just part of it; life can indeed be hard: just not all the time. Some times the livin’s easy- when it’s summertime for instance. It can be meaningful or meaningless, full or empty, exciting or dull. And yes, it’s often hard in more ways than we can count. But even though life isn’t always hard, I would point out, it is always complex. Always.

Instead: Life is complex. Our failure to appreciate the complexity inherent in the simplest of living is leading us into troubles of all sorts. For instance, leaders of big nations that don’t appreciate complexity have been known to rush into little ones, thinking that democratizing them would be a cinch; by that, meaning there would be few casualties incurred; that their pictures in History's "high school yearbook" would look cool.

And a Citizenry who equally lacks appreciation of, or out of fear ignores the fact, that Life is ultimately Complex, will live at the hands of leaders who readily woo people into false simplicity in order to domesticate them for their own causes: causes which boil down to their getting the prized adolescent status of bmoc (big man on campus).

Complexity and its off-spring, swirling uncertainty, are difficult to live with. Indeed we often feel them as threats to our very lives. Our human ability to comprehend any complexity though- and we all do have this ability somewhere in us- fends off this threat. In fact, our unique ability to comprehend, that is, our ability to make sense of things new to us, is itself, an act of simplifying and a skill that we can hone. Over simplification on the other hand, is a delusion to avoid.

As a species, we Humans have used the auspices of both religion and science to oversimplify life; by this I mean that we have a tendency to shrink the scale of life from something beyond our grasp to a scale that can't escape our grasp. We've done this through religion by positing a simple power in the sky that we seek to manage through our behavior, such as disallowing gay marriage. And we've done it through science by reducing the complexity of life to the logic of Newton- that is, the logic of a pool table: a thing at rest can't move on its own accord; it's stuck in place until another thing bumps it along a vector not of its own choosing. Here, our closest cousin really isn't a chimp it's a billiard ball….

So what is the cost of our fearing complexity? How do we enter into complexity with confidence? What are the implications of re-conceiving our lives in terms of complexity rather than simplistic mechanics or simplistic theism?

These are my questions that I want to explore through this blog. These are the questions that I want to pose to you who undoubtedly are complex and therefore have something valuable to add to this exploration.

Finally, I would add, Human Being is made for complex life. Therefore, if we are to truly live in the fullness of life, we have to be willing to enter into its complexity: this means, we have to be willing to enter more deeply into our humanness.