About This Blog (under construction)

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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