Woolgathering
The Woolgatherers
This is a salute to all who wander aimlessly – walking alone or in small groups, recording streams of consciousness, incoherent ramblings, out-of-head ravings, and incessant thoughts demanding expression. You and I have never met, but we are part of a merry band driven not to manufacture but to experience; seeking not fortune but immersion in the present moment; not pursuing the monetization of truth; unconcerned by our culture’s distaste for the unproductive. Woolgathering is an expression that arose in the 16th Century, meaning, “Indulging in wandering fancies and purposeless thinking,” from the literal meaning, “Gathering fragments of wool torn from sheep by bushes, etc.,” which is an activity that requires much wandering to little purpose. If this is your daily occupation, then you just might be a woolgatherer too.
Never define yourself in opposition to what you hate.
If you lay completely still, the landscape moves not at all, but the skyscape is quite dynamic.
Quantum Children
Youth are tapping into the historical moment and rejecting categories and distinctions. They connect to “God as One” while their parents are stuck on “God as Rule Giver”.
Unpopular
Biology is conservative, meaning that an organism will never do more than is necessary to get its needs met. Wasted effort is a threat to viability.
Humans benefit most directly from wealth, good looks, and social acumen, and those who have these traits will naturally use them to get their needs met. In a sense, they just need to “show up." They’re the popular crowd.
Those who do not have these traits are usually in the unpopular crowd and will need to dig a little deeper into other aspects of their personalities, develop latent talents, and think outside the box to get their needs met.
This process creates a deeper, more interesting person who may develop a wicked sense of humor, work to change a messed-up world, and be a lot more fun to have a drink with.
Being unpopular spurs creative transformation. Embrace it.
is so fundamentally flawed.
“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
- Jorge Luis Borges
Light Shining From Words
A question. Should light shine from words or shine on words? In medieval times, sanctuaries were dimly lit by sputtering candles. Illiterate worshippers were stirred by mysterious ritual and chants in a language they did not understand. In modern times, sanctuaries are brightly lit by electric bulbs that glaringly illuminate vernacular words marching purposefully inside prayer books, which highly literate consumers struggle to make meaningful to their lives. In some ways, we are so much more advanced. In some ways, we’re completely missing the point.
Nistarim
According to Kabbalah, there are 36 humans by whose merit the world endures. They are called the Nistarim – the Hidden Ones. If you recognize one, know that you are wrong. If a person thinks that, maybe, they are one, that person should know that they are not. It is a condition that is beyond recognition. It is a state that defies description. But know that they are here, and they are real. You should treat every person as if they are one of the 36 humans by whose merit the world endures. You'll never recognize them as such - and neither will they. But that's how it is.
Happiness is contingent on what’s happening. Joy is not.
Culture
Culture results from the intersection of instinct, environment, and history – a constellation of internal and external experiences composing a collective narrative. It includes language, religion, ethics, food, art, literature, music, sports, clothing, and customs related to sexuality, birth, death, major life events, relationship toward one’s physical body, attitudes toward the stranger, and beliefs regarding the natural world. Culture declares what is valued and what is despised. It underlies and drives behavior. It provides the framework and context of human life. And if one is to truly find oneself, it must be transcended. See what happens when you step outside your culture's assumptions. It will be disorienting and will force you to ask, “Who am I? What am I?”
A moment of joy in a time of cataclysm is no less sweet.
Once you see the game for what it is you can no longer play it with childlike abandon.
Heal Thyself
The upside of the current climate crisis is that it’s forcing us to confront the sickness inside ourselves because it’s our inherent drive for power and control, our addiction to consumerism, and the snowballing increase of our population that’s putting the planet at risk.
Big changes are needed to moderate the external forces increasing flood, fire, and drought, and to do this, we must control the internal forces driving our behavior. Higher order processes must move to the front so we can begin to ponder the scary, haunting question that underlies and fuels our careening, out-of-control lifestyles. That question is, “What’s the point of it all?”
It’s a query that keeps us up at night and undermines the meaningfulness of our most cherished customs and institutions. Better to research a new car to buy, think about re-carpeting the living room, or make vacation plans than to ruminate on such dark musings.
But nothing can be more important. Coming to terms with this question would bring equanimity to our souls and naturally moderate some of our most unhealthy behaviors.
Existential Crisis
An existential crisis is triggered when we identify an underlying lack of meaning and purpose to life. We just can’t see the point of it all and fall into a funk because to wash the car, eat breakfast, or even tie our shoes one more time seems completely ridiculous.
Existential crises are hardly ever experienced by people struggling to get their basic needs met. Life at that level is pretty meaningful – find something to eat or die. Rather, it lands on folks who have that part of life taken care of, leaving them time and energy to look around and say, “So really, what is the point of all of this?” And if they’re being honest with themselves, they discover that they have no ready answer, which is kind of devastating.
This often triggers a renewed wave of activities designed to distract the mind from such morbid thoughts, but sooner or later they’ll be caught off guard in a quiet, pensive moment and think about it again. Ugh. But resolving existential crises is actually straight-forward.
It occurs when we put ourselves into situations that stimulate wonder and awe, experiencing the profound mystery that wraps our world like a mother’s loving embrace. Mystery is the unanswerable question. It’s what can be experienced but never understood. And learning how to live with it is the appropriate response to angst and depression.
Wonder and Awe
Experiencing wonder and awe is the antidote to existential depression. Wrapping ourselves inside the mystery of life lifts the spirit. It moves us beyond the need to understand our own existence since we discern that everything “just is” with a clarity and beauty that is more persuasive than any philosophical argument.
It doesn’t lead to a blissed-out life blinded by the fog of wonderment but rather it simply instills intuitive confidence that a meaningful foundation underlies all of creation. But it’s a path closed off to many people. Childhood or historical trauma can shut down wonder and awe because it just feels too dangerous to fully open oneself up to the world, thus creating a constricted and gray point of view.
Also, some cultures demand that adults maintain a constant, stoic and staid façade and it takes truly momentous events to crack their hard exteriors and allow the light of wonderment to seep in. But for our own good health, we should try to attain states of amazement as often as possible.
Tim revives, see how he rises
Timothy rising from the bed
Said "Whirl your whiskey around like blazes
“Tunderin’ Jaysus, d’ya think I'm dead?"
-Tim Finnegan’s rise after the fall from the scaffold in the traditional Irish song Finnegan's Wake
“Events undergo the formality of actually occurring.”
- Alfred North Whitehead
Mycelium
Peace – let the feral dogs pass, let them run free into the shadowed recesses of snowpack streams and crevassed rivulets driving water under fallen beams. Heart be still – quiet as death to hear the small voice of God murmuring along mycelial highways, connecting nodes, programming the cross pollination of fungal information linking unwitting tree to tree to tree – networking the forest, quilting it together for blind, nematodal visions of ecstasy.
The Tree of Life
According to the Genesis myth, there were 2 trees in the Garden of Eden. The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. God granted our ancestors permission to eat from everything in the garden except the Tree of Knowledge saying, “For on the day that you eat it you shall surely die."
Of course, they ate from it, got kicked out of the Garden, and introduced death to the world. Kabbalah fills in important gaps left in the written text. It explains that the “sin” of the first humans was not that they ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Rather, it was that they ate from the Tree of Knowledge before eating from the Tree of Life.
God wants us to investigate, probe, experiment, and understand the world around us but always with the spirit of humility, which is the essence of the fruit growing from the Tree of Life. A life well lived will always produce an accurate assessment of our place in the world.
The true meaning of the story is that knowledge without humility brings death to the world, which is a hugely important distinction.
Humility
Humility starts with the recognition that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.
Next, it's deepened through the art of truly living, putting ourselves out there, making mistakes, looking foolish, loving, losing love, getting hurt, getting dirty, getting clean, exploring, creating, learning, and forgetting.
Finally, humility is about answering the question raised by Robert MacFarlane in his book, Underland – “Are we being good ancestors?” Are we thinking several, hundreds, or even thousands of generations into the future or are we only thinking about ourselves?
Humility is practiced slowly, one encounter at a time, being fully immersed in the moment and weaving together the many points of view that create the world around us, having our own identities, but not being separate.
Tipi
Taut as an old drum
canvass wrapped like a white shawl
cedar smoke rising
Seasons
Seasons spiral past
through baby, youth, elder, death
reborn in the spring
Climbing
Numb hand reaches out
frozen water pummels head
scent of fear rising
Snow Blind
Eyes frozen open
snow-blind creatures follow scent
water flows below
Snow Melt
Branch slips out of snow
reddish bark left wet, naked
swaying in cold sun
“There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy.”
- Merlin Sheldrake in Entangled Life.
"One is continually firstmeeting with odd sorts of others at all sorts of ages!"
- James Joyce in Finnegans Wake
Fire (A Public Service Announcement)
Please don’t build, or buy homes in the western part of North America prone to fire. First, sooner or later you will experience the tragic loss of everything you own and love. Second, the presence of your home, and the homes of your neighbors, will spur fire suppression that will lead to the build-up of underbrush and a future mega fire that will sterilize the soil. If you need to live in the wooded mountains, invest in a camper truck or a temporary, mobile structure like a tipi or yurt. That way, when the fire comes, which it eventually will, you can get out of the way and move to a different locale. Thank you.
Individuation
Pure physicality is like the rind without the fruit: empty, superficial, deceptive. Pure spirit is like the fruit without the rind: exposed, dried-out, prone to decay. Integration is the goal.
“Melancholy differs from grief in its chronic nature: it is an ache not a wound, it lies deeper down, is longer lasting, is lived with rather than died of.”
- Rob MacFarlane in Landmarks
“In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition.”
- Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass.
The Seeker
To seek is to pursue something we don’t have. To be a Seeker is to pursue something we can never have. The Seeker doesn’t aim toward an attainable goal. Instead, the Seeker wrestles with the angel who cannot be overcome, searching only for the still, small voice straining to be heard inside the encounter. The struggle is unwinable and yet the Seeker presses on, knowing that this stalemate is the closest to truth a soul can get. Every insight is eclipsed by deeper, hidden questions. Every emotion is only a shadow of its source. Every perception is just a thin slice taken from a wider field. There is so much that's beyond the knowable, but the Seeker can smell it all in the infinite breeze blowing onto the finite shore. Ultimately, it’s just an intuition, a fleeting taste – but it satisfies.
Nature is Not Kind
Nature is neither kind nor unkind. It flows between birth and death. Sometimes swiftly, sometimes not. It maintains balance. Sometimes by adding, sometimes by taking away. It overwhelms with its beauty and indifference. Sometimes it can't stop talking, other times it's inscrutable. It passes through and over the heart. It feeds and flees the mind. And in the end, it provides the bed for our sleep - vegetation, rock, and water dutifully receiving our essence and passing it back into the flow.
Breathe deeply and go slowly.
Truth makes no sense to the unwounded.
Gum Arabic
Transforming substance – emulsifier
Resin of the wise
Vis animans – life force
Glutinum mundi – glue of the world
Medium between mind and body
The One (God) became two (man and woman)
The two became three (child is born)
The transforming substance is added and the three become One
Water of the stone
Duplex – masculine and feminine
Aqua mercurialis
Self-fertilization
Mercurial dragon
Leading straight to the Anthropos
Stillness and breath
Deep time
Slowness
Constancy
Moderation
Humility
Equanimity
Lonely
We’re all like Rumi’s reed flute, playing songs of longing for the water from which we’ve been cut. If so, can’t we at least gather around the silhouette of our shared loneliness? Haven’t we the vision to recognize ourselves in another’s strained smile? Opening ourselves to the fact that we are spirits alive in bodies makes us vulnerable, but also sublime.
John Cage
He lived
He loved
He foraged
He died
Spiral
Singularity is exceptional, different. Unity is integrated, together. One is a note, the other a chord. Ego fills space while humility allows room for the other - accommodating but not weak. Collective energy circulates. A single vector penetrates this moving circle and becomes a spiral climbing away from a point of departure. This is meaning. Grab on to it. Let it take you out of the swamp of your dismal thoughts and into the realm of pure concrescence.
Every single, solitary moment is lost.
What do you do if there is nobody to tell you to stop?
The Myth of Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus shows how the conscious, self-aware human is higher than the gods, who are eternally caught up in their petty politics and cycles of pleasure and vengeance.
Sisyphus experiences a profound insight as he walks to the bottom of the hill after the boulder rolls back down. In that moment, he recognizes the absurdity of his repeated action. He examines it “from the outside” and sees how pointless it is.
But the power of this revelation fills him with a happiness that is beyond explanation. He is now connected to an understanding that lifts him above the mundane. He takes a breath, puts his shoulder back to the stone, and starts pushing it up the hill again.
The Fluid Age
The world has become more fluid. Traditional cultural roles and boundaries have been blurred, shifted, or completely obliterated. Society increasingly allows room for individuals to move beyond rigid identification with specific gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, occupation, and religion.
We also now have tools to create and explore realities that have nothing to do with what we’ve always called the “physical world.” The internet, applied artificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic engineering, autonomous machine learning, and the advent of chimeras have changed the rules.
These dynamics invite backlash from conservative elements that want to bring us back to “common sense” notions of how things are supposed to be. But the genie’s out of the bottle. We can’t go back now.
Instead, we need to wrap our heads, hearts, and arms around the impact of these recent technological innovations and learn how to keep our balance while surfing this newest wave of cultural disruption.
We are channels for the Divine and when ego blocks the way, bad things happen.
As soon as we try to convert direct experience into a truth, we’ve lied.
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is the practice of immersive, aware experience. It is never the result of isolating one sense apart from (or above) the others. It transcends thinking. It compels feeling and defines sensation. It is the instant in all its multifarious wonder – beyond criticism, answering every inquiry, sitting serenely with the unanswerable question; absolutely enraptured, in love with what’s happening right now. Also, it is the blazing sun, the hard breeze, and the drought afflicting the crops; the hunger that makes corpses of us all. Ultimately, it is the infinite moment (in all its aspects) that leads to a life worth living.
The Earth’s Love
Robin Wall Kimmerer is the only writer of the natural world I've encountered who talks about the earth’s love toward us. This perspective helped change my outlook from one of unrequited love (me toward it) to relationship where we both want the best for each other. Her insight arises from a Native American worldview that sees landscape as animate and alive. This implies that our presence in the natural world must lead to a mutual “coming to terms” with each other and a negotiated balance between needs and gifts.
Racism
Racism is the result of the Insider/Outsider and Power & Control instincts. We all fall into this mode unless we actively strive to transcend our “hard wiring." The Oppressed will always become the Oppressor when given the chance – unless…unless, we seek something higher.
I’m lonely and, unfortunately, spending time with other people doesn’t make me any less lonely.
The natural world allows us to hear the still, small voice of God.
Mechanical Noise
I can no longer tolerate mechanical noise escaping from materials being torturously bent, pulled, whirred, and pinched in ways antithetical to their natures.
Evolution
The human experiment is a long one. Evolving a set of wings or a tail is a pretty neat trick but hauling ourselves out of the instinctual mud and flopping onto the firm ground of self-awareness, compassion, and human dignity is something else entirely. The transitional human must constantly fight against the impulse to slide back into the ooze of moral judgement, bigotry, and violence.
Breath Body
Before age 50, we expend energy and attention on our outward form – the physical body. After age 50, we must shift attention to our breath body. The physical body is a vessel for our journeys through the corporeal world. The breath body carries our spirit after death. Life and death are not opposites. The opposite of death is actually birth. Birth is an experience. Death is an experience. But life is eternal. Direct the breath to create the body you want to use when the time comes. Hopefully, you have many years to get it right, but don’t wait. Because maybe you don’t.
Two Camps
There have always been two camps. One camp focuses on what unites all of humanity and the other sees what strengthens the tribe. One camp recognizes global opportunities and threats while the other jockeys for position to maintain dominance.
One camp sees religion and science as liberating forces meant to set us free and the other views them as tools designed to gain mastery and control. The wheel always turns. Today one camp is on top and the next day, the other.
There is no answer. It’s the way of the world. All one can do is show open-heartedness, recognizing the forces at work and having compassion for everyone caught forever on this turning wheel.
Mystery cannot be understood but it can be experienced.
What if the only thing that’s true is something that can’t be monetized?
Beyond Instinct
By nature, we are like the Great Apes in our social structure and behavior, which is internally based on male dominance and a hierarchy of control and externally driven by competition and conflict with members of other troops.
This Law of the Jungle behavior where the strong dominate the weak, and it’s always a “tooth and claw” struggle for survival, is our “natural” state (especially when under stress), and if there is no intervention, it is how we generally behave.
One type of intervention is societal, including religion and humanistic education that promote welcoming the stranger and caring for the weak and vulnerable, even if it goes against personal or tribal self-interest. However, societal level interventions are not very dependable because religion and education are easily co-opted by powerful interest groups that benefit from a Law of the Jungle way of life.
A second type of intervention is individualistic, including meditation, mindfulness, and shamanic practices that produce heightened states of awareness and expanded consciousness, thus moving the individual to a place where hurtful instinctual behaviors are viewed as abhorrent.
This person remains impervious to cultural and instinctual influences while employing these exercises and can then join with other like-minded individuals to incrementally change the world around them.
It’s not a sin to recognize differences between people but it is a sin to value only a small subset of those differences.
“The world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”
- Carl Jung
Alchemy
Phase one: Nigredo. Blackening, burning, and putrefying the ego in the crucible of confession and catharsis. Sickness. Phase two: Albedo. Whitening, washing, and purifying the ego with the flow of unconscious material. Inundation. Phase three: Citrinitas. Weaving, cleaving, and mixing the shadow and ego. The chemical wedding. Phase four: Rubedo. Navigating, engaging, and transforming the external world with the fully integrated Self. Individuation.
Conviviality
Consumerism is best understood as a preoccupation, or even obsession, with acquiring goods and services. It creates a life devoted to making money for the purpose of spending money.
But if we stop for a moment and take a breath, we’ll realize that we end up having no time to actually use or appreciate what we possess because the conveyor belt never stops – there is always the next “must have” thing to buy or the hottest bucket-list destination to vacation in, which compels us to work even harder and longer to afford them.
Ivan Illich promoted what he called the spirit of conviviality as an antidote for this sickness. In his book, Tools for Conviviality, Illich describes a way of living that empowers the individual, connects people together in friendly camaraderie, and creates a sustainable community by viewing tools as neutral vessels that can be employed in multiple ways, thus unlocking our freedom of expression, rather than tools that are only able to be used as prescribed by the manufacturer, keeping us stuck inside the consumer paradigm. It’s the ethos of the ethical hacker community.
Living convivially is the antidote to consumerism because in a convivial society most of our time would be spent using our tools and technology to promote individual and communal creativity rather than pursuing a consumerist paradise. It also promotes generosity, with the universe of open-source materials as a good example of what is possible when operating in a convivial manner.
The human world is either on the brink of irrevocable disaster or an unimaginable, eschatological concrescence.
Nostalgia is pretty thin soup.
InTune
One guitar string is never out of tune. Nor is it ever in tune. “In tune” only relates to many strings together. The one string is whatever note it is – higher or lower depending on the tension between the anchor points.
The many strings build on, and play off, each other in a way that creates harmony, or its opposite. Harmony is the one absolute truth in nature. But it expresses itself in many ways. The standard guitar tuning is EADGBE but there are a variety of other tunings. No matter the tuning though, one can always tell when the guitar is "out of tune". It’s disharmonious and at least one string needs to be tenderly adjusted to perfectly complement the mix.
There are myriad ways to be in tune and it is our job to find the ones that fit us best and not judge others who play in different tunings.
The Big Picture
The mind cannot comprehend the span of time since our planet’s formation. Try. You’ll quickly find yourself numbing out, shutting down, or just finding something else to think about. It’s impossible to stay focused on something that is so beyond direct, personal experience. Our hard wiring simply won’t allow it because it adds nothing to threat avoidance or reward acquisition.
The overriding goal of our millions of years of evolution has been to survive just long enough to pro-create and see that the next generation lives long enough to pro-create too. During this immense timespan continents have moved across the globe, glaciers have expanded and contracted multiple times, and whole waves of extinctions have devastated plant and animal life.
Through it all, we’ve been able to adapt to the slow, incremental changes in our environment without ever moving beyond the prime directive of simple propagation. Until now. Today, our planet is attempting to support a human population of almost 8 billion, most of whom are still following behavior patterns developed when the global human population was about 1 million.
Unless we want the planet to self-correct this imbalance through the tried and true mechanisms of pandemic, famine, and/or war we’d better start thinking about how to take hold of the steering wheel and direct the vehicle onto a safer road.
“You should all know that the journey begins where the words stop.”
- Terence McKenna
Down with slogans!
Educating Women
The World Economic Forum states that one of the most powerful tools in stemming unsustainable population growth is education – especially for women. For example, uneducated Malian women have on average, 7 children. For the better educated, the number is 4.
Raising the legal age of marriage and providing women with opportunities to join the workforce are also effective strategies. It’s empowering to women and girls but scares patriarchal cultures and institutions to death.
These “innovations” are seen as threats to their way of life that must be stamped out. From their point of view, women driving cars in Saudi Arabia or attending college in Niger are just signs of sickness from the West creeping in to infect those countries with immorality.
But the truth is, these “ways of life” can only exist when one half of the population has been removed from the public sphere. What’s always been seen as a local issue is now a global problem because the current human population growth rate is putting unsustainable pressures on the planet we all share.
Supporting the worldwide education of women and providing them with economic opportunities is the best way to change the direction of the growth chart and we should all support it in any way we can.
That said, it should also be remembered that the carbon footprint of an average person in the U.S. is 15.52 tons while the carbon footprint of an average person in Mali is .09 tons. Obviously, Malian women having less children is not the only answer.
Intellect and Spirit
You can’t drive in a screw with a hammer. It’s the wrong tool for the job. But if everyone around you is saying that a hammer is the answer to every problem you’ll probably try to figure out some way to use it on the screw. And you might even (somehow) get it into the wood, probably hurting yourself and ruining the project along the way.
The intellect is an amazing tool we’ve used to develop antibiotics, attain space travel, and discover the quantum world, but it’s not the only tool in our belt and it’s not the right one for every job.
There are some big questions related to the source and scope of the universe, the existence of human consciousness, and how we fit into it all that intellect can’t fully address. It can take us a long way down the road but it won’t bring us to the ultimate destination, which is outside its jurisdiction.
The correct tool for questions like these is spirit, which connects us to the world in immersive and intuitive ways, shines a light on the shy, inarticulate complexity of oneness, and provides stability when confronting the unknowable. We need to push our intellectual understanding as far as possible, but sooner or later, we have to leave that vehicle behind and use another.
Novelty
Nothing is worse for the soul than complacency. The world loses its shine when we forget the urgency of living and just start going through the motions. But this type of descent is the most natural thing in the world and is guaranteed to happen unless we intentionally seek out novelty, escaping smug routines and shooting down accidental pathways of discovery.
If you usually frequent the artisanal coffee shop down the street, try a truck stop diner once and see what happens. Or vice versa. Strike up conversations with people outside your own peer group. Walk down railroad tracks and see the backsides of buildings you drive by every day – it will feel brand new.
If nature is your thing, explore the urban landscape. Read an author you don’t completely agree with. Connect to a news source with points of view outside your own. Don’t worry, your perspective and opinions can take it, and they’ll come out stronger. Shaking things up will help you find new inspiration and energy for engaging with the world more completely.
Ideological purity is the greatest threat facing human existence.
A river without banks is just a flood.
The Tribal Mind
Why are more people not upset about melting glaciers in Greenland? The simple answer is that the vast majority of people have never been to Greenland, don’t know anyone from Greenland, and likely will never visit the place.
Human vision is generally myopic, mostly concerned about what’s immediately affecting ourselves, our families, and our close circle of friends. It’s a mindset developed over at least 50 thousand years of living in small, tribal units and it’s not easily displaced.
Of course, melting glaciers don’t only affect those living in their immediate vicinity – it’s something that impacts us all. But people can easily opt out of responsibility by attributing climate change to the “Will of God” or resorting to other cop-outs like, "The science is contradictory."
Also, those with money and resources know they will be sheltered from the worst effects of climate change and are therefore not as worried about it. For instance, rich homeowners in the American West are already hiring private firefighters to protect their properties from wildfires. They reason that their clan will come through this just fine. As always, the challenge is to help the tribal mind evolve into a more global perspective.
The Global Mind
The first goal of propaganda during wartime is to demonize the enemy because most humans cannot easily kill other humans. But we can kill [place derogatory term here] because we’re taught that “these people” are loathsome with low morals, low intelligence, etc. They commit atrocities. They threaten our women and children. Getting rid of them would be a kindness to all that’s good in the world.
These same tactics are being used in our current culture war with its renewed push toward tribalism. If we want to stop this slide, we must undermine its foundation by humanizing the “other." And the best way to do that is to create opportunities for people from various groups to meet each other and work on meaningful, common goals.
I’ve seen this work inside organizations when individuals from different divisions convene for interdisciplinary work groups. If the groups are well facilitated, the members leave with newfound appreciation and respect for people from other parts of the organization – and a new level of trust.
Creating a global perspective in folks who tend toward tribalism happens one encounter at a time, but it can’t be left at a “meet and greet” stage. Rather, it must include real work toward tangible goals that all sides value.
“A Knower may know himself. That is his limit.”
- Carl Jung in The Red Book
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
- Opening (and re-opening) line of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
Resiliency
Relationship is the number one factor protecting us from trauma. It heals our wounds and nurtures resiliency, which is the emotional flexibility that allows us to gracefully navigate through life’s various threats and hurts.
Relationship, which includes friendships and other long-term alliances is currently under threat due to the increasing pace of life, reliance on social media to meet our relationship needs, and the geographic fragmentation of families and friends. We must adjust to this new reality.
First, relationship can also include random encounters when two or more people are fully present for each other and share authentic connection. Don’t overlook the power of tuning into all the people around you – even those in moments that seem insignificant.
Second, we can develop relationship with animals and the natural world. Take time to seek out these non-human partnerships as well.
Finally, we can push the boundaries of social media. Use it in novel and convivial ways that challenge ourselves and others to dig deeper and connect more completely than how the monetizing founders of these platforms envisioned.
Charisma
There is nothing more charismatic than someone completely present in the moment. Imagine a toddler at play, your favorite footballer weaving through defenders, jazz musicians improvising together, a mathematician solving a problem. The list goes on.
They’re all “in the zone” and we can’t take our eyes off any of them – while they’re in the zone. But their light often dulls when they step away from the activity because self-consciousness returns and they’re just people again.
Charisma is an energy emitted when we negate the ego by immersing ourselves inside an experience. It has nothing to do with physical appearance, wealth, or fame. It has everything to do with connecting ourselves to the infinite sweep of the universe.
Learn to string these moments together and you’ll create an amazing life for yourself. And because you’re not burdened by the ego, you will more easily join with others to work on goals outside of yourself.
You’d never eat compost, but the fruit growing from it…mmm.
“Raising my cup, I toast the bright moon, and facing my shadow makes friends three, though moon has never
understood wine, and shadow only trails along behind me.”
- Li Po in Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon
The Seven Sages
According to the Asia Society, the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were, “A group of Chinese learned men from the third century CE. During a time of political upheaval, the group distanced themselves from governmental service, choosing instead to spend time engaged in Taoist-inspired discussions, poetry, and music, sometimes while inebriated.” Am I the only person in the world who wishes he could join them in the Bamboo Grove? I don’t think so.
Variants
Evolution proceeds because a change in environmental conditions forces a species to adapt new forms and behaviors to get their needs met. The members of the group would never “choose” to change – nature is conservative and abhors unnecessary experimentation with what’s working. Rather, they are forced to change to simply survive. But it’s not always the entire species that adapts. For example, shrinking habitat may make it impossible to maintain a current population so members of a species with atypical traits may be able to find a place in a new ecological niche and break away from the main group, increasing their own numbers and starting a different line. Perhaps, the original group continues to happily munch fruit up in the remaining canopy while the new one marches onto the plain for a more varied diet and lifestyle. And perhaps one day, the canopy will disappear completely and only the variants on the plain will survive.
I’ve lost count as to how many people I’ve hurt and how many people have hurt me, so I’ve stopped counting.
“…when something long since passed away comes back again in a changed world, it is new.”
- Carl Jung in The Red Book
Psychic Nature
Mountains, rivers, forests, and oceans may exist independently of human perception but the term “natural world” is merely a projection of the human psyche onto innocent, unsuspecting landscapes. What we’re looking at, what we’re walking through, what we’re sailing across, what we’re cutting down and exploiting depends on the mental filters and emotive associations used to create meaning. When we look across the valley from a rise we may see the geographic skin of deep time, a color palette that will inspire our next painting, a mountain bike track, the home to an endangered species of butterfly, hidden oil resources, a paradise, a dangerous swamp, lost childhood, national pride, a threat, a new start, redemption…the list goes on and on. The “natural world” is potentially all these things at the same time and the projections take only an instant.
History
Historical time precedes and drives the destiny of humanity, meaning we could not reach the potential of our species without first developing a collective memory and narrative that allowed us to build on our accomplishments and learn from our mistakes. "History" is a construct created through the advent of writing, which recorded and "immortalized" the actions of individuals. Instead of the eternal repetition of mythic events - "We plant wheat this way because that is how the First Man planted wheat," or "We build our city this way because God formed the world in the same pattern," our ancestors were now able to document current events (and interlocking series of events) involving real people acting in unique ways; i.e., history. This innovation allowed us to spiral up and away from the circular repetition of time that characterized pre-history.
Once upon a time, everything we used was biodegradable.
My body is a radio and I am a signal.
Flat Earthers Explained
The Flat Earth Theory is not a “theory” at all. Rather it is a rejection of the scientific worldview. Flat Earthers are pained by the fact that science seems to have reduced existence to just an endless series of unsolved problems instead of the Great Mystery they intuit it to be. Flat Earth Theory (and similar beliefs) are the inevitable result of bad science and bad religion.
Bad science says that the scientific method of inquiry and explanation is the only legitimate way of understanding the world, leading to the belief that either, 1) Given enough time science can explain everything, or 2) If science can’t explain it, then the question is not worth asking. For example, the Big Bang Theory works very well when used to explain the cataclysmic instant of energy discharge and everything that came after it but has absolutely nothing to say about what was there the moment before the big bang and what set the process into motion – or if there was a previous universe from which ours arose, what set that universe’s formation into motion (ad infinitum). There will never be enough time for science to answer these questions because science is not the right tool for the job, but that doesn’t mean the questions are meaningless. In fact, they’re probably the most meaningful questions we have.
On the other hand, bad religion says that any explanation that veers from traditional beliefs and “common sense” is fundamentally flawed and undermines a historically effective worldview that explains and understands creation. Bad religionists would say, “Any explanation that appears to take the mystery out of life and exchanges it with theories that get intermittently replaced by other theories is no foundation for a meaningful existence.”
But science and religion are mutually exclusive only when viewed through poor lenses. Science can teach a lot about existence and improve life in unimaginable and never-ending ways, but it has its limits. Because the truth is, there are legitimate questions that lie outside its purview. Religion can provide the “why” to life and help direct the content of our scientific pursuits in life-affirming and meaningful directions. If science and religion have the confidence to respect each other's perspective, all will be well. If not, then Flat Earth "theories" will be the inevitable result.
The Dance
Human striving is, ultimately, a desire for what we cannot have; connecting the last dot – that final step to completion and knowledge where we walk out of the fog of human consciousness and into the light of pure revelation and understanding. Day-to-day, we’re compelled toward activities geared to meet Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (physical, safety, love & belonging, esteem, and self-actualization), and while so engaged forget about the dizzying void that borders human awareness. But even the category of self-actualization is only about achieving one’s full potential. What about that which lies beyond our potential? That’s where the empty ache haunting our steps resides, and when we stop dancing long enough to take a breath, we feel it.
“You lean over my meaning’s edge and feel a dizziness of the things I have not said.”
- Trumbull Stickney
Humility is understanding what you do not understand - knowing what you do not know.
Focus
What do you see? Only decay and death or perhaps restoration and life too? Do you focus on the ending of one stage or the beginning of the next? Do you wrinkle your nose at the compost pile or happily rub hands together, waiting for the day to shovel it onto the garden? Do you see failure as final or just an opening move in the Long Game? Do you see lack as a shameful flaw or just the opposite side of your golden coin? One person moans in despair at the calamity of the moment while another plans a clever course of action. Where we place our focus will define how we move through the world – either away from danger or toward opportunity.
In youth, our actions are propelled by reproduction. In old age, they’re driven by mortality.
Depression arises when we cannot take our sadness to the appropriate depth.
Genius
Genius is a Latin word that alludes to, “an attendant spirit present from one's birth that leads to an innate ability or inclination.” It is like the word muse, which the Ancient Greeks used to identify the goddesses who presided over the arts and sciences. Today, we see a muse as “any person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist.” The inspiration may come from the inside (attendant spirit) or from the outside (admired person), but in either case, it is separate from the identified “self.” In this view, we only tap into our genius and realize our complete potential after we renounce exclusive ownership of our talents and drives.
“It is one of the joys of studying history that first impressions are always wrong.”
- Graham Robb in The Debatable Land
“Whoever possesses wisdom is not greedy for power.”
- Carl Jung in The Red Book
Meditation
Immersion in the natural world makes me yearn for human kindness and compassion. Immersion in the human world triggers a defensive cringe against the meanness that surrounds me. While life in the natural world is lush, the margin for error is razor thin – the unfit simply die. And while the human heart breaks at the sight of a loved one in pain, the wounded stranger is often seen as simply an impediment to one’s own contentment. We can extend compassion to those apart from our own family and clan, but this will only work if we first rise above our natural impulses and recognize the inherent meanness within ourselves. Regular meditation resets the nervous system away from grasping, greedy urges that lead to hurtful behavior. It places us in a state beyond the natural and human worlds where we can integrate opposites.
“The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men.”
- Ivan Illich in Tools of Conviviality
Death is real while heaven and hell are pure conjecture.
Thought
which has no further use for you.
It flies away – wearing a crown
and you are left grasping at air.
“I have spent my life making ritual objects for a tribe that doesn’t exist.”
- Artist Steve Dilworth
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