Spirit of Dissent

Relationships: They Are Us

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:13:00 +0000

There comes a point in life, indeed many points if one is dedicated to constant reflection, where what was once thought no longer seems quite as neat and tidy. Front and center for me now is the oft-repeated notion people use for making decisions, dedicated as they are to the continued existence of a particular connection and thus guide their life “for the sake of the relationship.” A healthy skepticism easily emerges from seeing far too many examples of people making decisions to continue with a relationship that has long since become destructive, and yet the practice continues. What I want to note here is that this continuation has less to do with people not being cognizant of what they’re doing and more on the inevitability of any decisions occurring within a relational matrix. The problem with this statement is not that people make decisions for relationships, it’s rather that they believe it’s an act of one ball, in this case the “I” making a decision to effect another ball, the “relationship,” but the reality is there was a relational existence already there.

The negative quality of making decisions “for the sake of the relationship” is a decision-making model that places all other considerations below that of a particular relationship, usually romantic. This model is often cited, usually unconsciously, whenever someone notes to a friend or themselves that they “did it to save the relationship” or “I’ve put so much work into it to give up now.” Just what “it” is, is as varied as there are forms of relationships. Giving up personal goals, decisions, hobbies, or anything that at one time felt like an important piece of identity, is often what “it” ends up being, placing on hold desires and goals for the sake of pursuing the current emotional connection.

Who among us hasn’t either said or heard someone declare “yes, well, I wanted to do it but I decided not to in order to focus on us.” Notice though that what is occurring is a behavior predicated upon the notion there exists an “I” which somehow rests in a space absent of mitigating variables who then decides to selectively choose to participate in a relationship such that personal desires are replaced with those of the relationship.

Truly this is a potentially negative situation to create and is the root cause of a great many people’s willingness to continue in connections that are no longer healthy. However, focusing on this decision model is not helpful in the attempt to change that influence because it isn’t real. There is no “I” deciding to engage in a relationship, there was always a relationship.

Try for a moment to think of yourself lacking in connection to anything or anyone. When this inevitably fails, try to imagine an aspect of your self that isn’t immediately connected to a situation, experience or person. Note that even if you decide to consider yourself in empty space, you’re still defining your existence in light of that space. Gautama, the first Buddha, noted that the self, while not exactly non-existent, was not the monolithic thing western philosophers were so enamored of. It was, in fact, merely one stream in a multitude of narratives, at times being ridden more often than others, but still only one among many. The truth of this insight can be found in any of those moments where upon reflection it is noted “that wasn’t me doing that” or “I can’t believe I would do that” or “where did that behavior come from?” We’ve all had those times and usually brush them off as aberrations from the central story we have ourselves, rationalizing such behavior away in light of extreme circumstances, lack of sleep, or in some cases even demonic possession.

Unless we wish to delve into bodily possession, which even at face value seems more self-serving than a real explanation, the hard truth is that in those situations there is nobody but us participating in the behavior. From this understanding can only come the conclusion that there exists any number of potential behaviors that, while not common, are still capable of being fulfilled with these bodies we, with childlike innocence, think we control more than we do.

Relationships, of any form though the romantic type gets most of the press, are the means by which these varying narratives, both the ones that are the “true me” and the aberrations, are instantiated. Daniel Siegel, in his work on interpersonal neurobiology, posits a triune understanding of the human person: the brain, the mind, and relationships. Neither of the three are subservient to the others and the triangular connection formed neither indicates a tempestuous union like Freud’s theory of the self nor does it point to a situation where one can be studied without referring to the others. The mind here is not a disembodied thing, but a descriptive term referring to the energy and information flow that is at the heart of all connections. Relationships then are the relational process of energy and information flow whereby two or more physically instantiated beings connect in a reciprocal matrix. Change is inevitable as is a relational dynamic at the heart of who we are as individuals. The centralizing concept of “I” is here no longer an existent thing in its own right but merely a pointer, a lexical device noting the presence of a particular narrative taking center stage.

We act and wonder at times where our behavior comes from, the arm-chair inner psychologist ruefully reminding us of how Mom or Dad did the exact same thing. We see one who we love in front of us as we engage in an activity otherwise never considered and reconcile the anxiety by dwelling within the connection or in other words “for the sake of the relationship.” Relationships, whether the initial attachments formed during childhood, or the adult attachments later based on them, provide avenues for energy and information flow and therefore the expression of ourselves. Some of those trails are similar to what has come before, some are grand diversions from where we thought we were going. However, none of them are happening as different streams we jump into but as the very means we live our life.

“We are like the company we keep,” is more than just philosophical observance or parental admonishment, it is the central fact of our lives. While there is certainly still much to be said about ignoring once cherished ethical concerns or ideological positions when in the service of maintaining a relationship, we would do well to remember that who we are requires relationships to be known. There is much we are capable of doing of which we are unaware simply because a relational dynamic has yet to emerge which would allow the space for that particular behavior to manifest.

When making decisions for the sake of a relationship, it is important to recognize that you were never not in a relationship, thus any decisions made are contextually shaped not only in their result but in the very reasoning that goes into deciding what to do.

© David Teachout

Oops, Where's the Exit?

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Fri, 10 May 2013 17:18:00 +0000

For those who drive, have you ever taken a wrong turn and found yourself in a dead-end, shaking your head in confusion and utterly flabbergasted that there is no road going through? For those who debate, have you ever found yourself in a rhetorical flourish only to realize that you’ve boxed yourself in through emotional appeal to a situation that at the beginning you never would have agreed with? That feeling of being trapped washes over you like a cold shower, your skin shivers, your thoughts stop and there’s a sense of being adrift in a land where causation has abandoned you at the drop-off point of a long line of linear connections. Looking back once one is in a more sober moment of reflection you can begin to glimpse the drift of the journey and how the result ended up being this full-tilt collision with fatalism, but the feelings remain and so the struggle begins to extricate oneself.

Just as above, so it is below in relationships. The emotional high has worn off, the excitement of that shiny new toy has become tarnished, the courtship has been replaced by the reality of a person who is far more nuanced than the princess/prince they began as, dashing and regal and sparkling in their unmitigated attempt at controlling a response from their intended target. I don’t mean to make this sound as abysmal as it may be coming across. Relational manipulation is not all about nefarious impulses, we all are subject to the desire to put our best foot forward, to display our charms to their greatest advantage, all for the purpose of creating a feeling of attraction in the other person and engendering reciprocal behavior. This is a game and culturally there exists all manner of ways in which it is played. We wear our best clothes to church to present a particular face to god, companies let it be known inspections are coming and so stores and employees look better that day than any other day, and we halt the words that in other social context would come spilling out but in front of the family isn’t as politically savvy to declare.

There is nothing inherently wrong with going about life this way, the problematic situation arises when we are blinded to seeing any of the outlying variables associated with the person, including ourselves. That job we so desperately wanted suddenly becomes a sinking ship as we realize the company’s numbers really weren’t as realistic as they noted; the clothing we tried on that looked so good in the dressing room suddenly becomes sheer in a different light exposing parts of ourselves we’d have rather kept hidden; and that relationship we were so enamored of suddenly doesn’t feel as safe or secure or beneficial as it once did.

I use “suddenly” here but honest appraisal leads us to acknowledge that the variables of that person’s darker side were there all along, our awareness simply didn’t stretch to see them. It’s existence is sudden only in the way that an object coming from our periphery appears as if from magic in front of us. Had we turned our head or broadened our conscious deliberation we’d have seen that object barreling at us, actual or metaphorical. We do ourselves no good by becoming incensed at our lack of sight, literal or mental. There are any number of variables in existence we blithely go about our lives in conscious ignorance of and which by and large have no deleterious effects. Unfortunately our lives are not as our stone-age evolutionary ancestors, we do not merely have to concern ourselves with the rustling bushes or the scattering of rocks from above, there are all manner of existent variables in life which can catch us unaware and, whether the incitation of our fight/flight/freeze response is ultimately helpful by pointing us towards a legitimate threat, still may create a problematic situation. The reason for this is the interconnected web of existence in which we live, where we are not the causal agents we so egoistically often assume, but another variable among many in the cosmic interplay of forces.

Certainly we are an important variable, but the old notion of viewing the so-called “external” world as somehow impinging upon us and by virtue of our magical free will selecting from an array of infinite possibilities the action we shall take is in line with that of a flat earth. The cosmic-relational perspective provides a means of viewing ourselves as within the world, not apart from it, where external and internal are simply biological delineations, not declarations of metaphysical import. What we have as opposed to rocks and trees is the ability to broaden our conscious awareness and thus via the power of intention focus on those other variables to effect ripples in the web of existence.

This has profound importance when it comes to relationship creation and the selection of people in our lives. When we cease looking at ourselves as autonomous context-free agents, we come to realize that the situations we are in, the history of our experiences and the memories that closely approximate them, and the people we are connected to are all variables just like us providing paths of potential outcomes. Our personal conceptualizations are relational from the ground of our familial attachment to the ever-increasing array of environmental connections we form in our lives. This includes both the internalization of projected narratives from others and our own projections out of that symphony of possible stories.

When we enter into a new connection, whether it be romantic or professional, it behooves us to halt for a moment a take a look at the context of our situation. If the person in front of us is dismissive of our inquiries or mocking in their appraisal of our desire to know more then we can rest assured that at minimum this is not someone we want influencing our journey. This studied inquiry, this meditative reflection can be done at any time though clearly there are moments when it is more difficult than others and it is there where the excitement of pleasure and the enticement of mystery should be mitigated by the joy of reflective increasing understanding. To find out that where one is located relationally is not beneficial for personal growth or safety is not to declare one’s innate foolishness or stupidity, but an opportunity to acknowledge the interconnected web of which humanity is a part and gain an impetus for change.

Gay Marriage Truly Is About Equality Not Marriage

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:22:00 +0000

From entire countries making marriage between same-sex couples legal to individual states and the President declaring legality and support, gay marriage is on the rise in public consciousness. Unfortunately this radical-gay agenda hopes to indoctrinate our children into having sin-filled sexual escapades resulting in the utter and complete destruction of civilization as we know it and the dissolution of humanity due to our inability to have any more babies. Oh wait, I'm sorry, that's what the conservative moralists are saying. Much like I've always wondered what the mind of Stephen King looks like that it's capable of coming up with such incredible horror stories, I also wonder what the mind of the conservative looks like when they come up with such ridiculous end-of-the-world statements. But then again, we're not talking rationality here and we're certainly not talking about the law, but about fear. And nothing spells fear like armageddon.

Opponents of "similar marriage" (remember that California beauty queen talking about “opposite marriage?” yeah, the comment is still ridiculous), are tied to this notion of preserving the institution of marriage. I’ve heard it said, clearly by a comedic genius, that given you can no longer sell your daughter for four sheep and six bushels of wheat then marriage has changed. Ignoring this historical shift, though I’m quite sure some wouldn’t mind going back to it, is fairly easily done for those more interested in ideological purity than connection with reality, but there does seem to be something here about that pesky thing called an “institution.” The term holds two different and not exactly concomitant definitions as it pertains to marriage. The first is legal, as it is an institution created and maintained by law for the purposes of establishing certain property and social rights upon two people who willingly enter into a contract.

Yes, marriage in legal terms is a contract. It is not, at that level, the pairing of two souls, or the completion of two-halves who sought their whole lives for that missing piece to their personal jigsaw puzzle. Rather, it is a means of establishing contractual obligations within a particular social relationship. There are laws like this for every social relationship, from the student-teacher to the cop-citizen, because in every relationship there will be or already is a disparity of power. Whether that difference is part of the original scheme or whether it is potential, laws are in place, ideally, to address these disparities and help make social relationships more equal. We are a nation that was built upon and progresses forward through the rule of law. Without it we are nothing more than a hodge-podge of city-states and geographical regions. The United States of America is a legal creation not a divine one. This country was established as a bright city on the hill to hold up the ideals of a democratic society, where rationality is embodied in the rule of law and serves as the medium for social exchange of ideas.

This reliance upon the law and rational public debate is precisely why the groups supporting the rights of gay people to marry turn to the legislature to see their hope become realized. There is a disparity, nobody denies that, not even the opponents. Two adults wish to engage in a specific contractual arrangement that millions of other couples succeed and fail at with startling rapidity, and they are denied for the sole reason that they possess the same reproductive parts. This is a disparity, one that we have as a country long sought to get rid of. African-Americans were denied their rights simply because of their skin color, a fact they could not control. Women were denied their rights because they didn't possess a penis and therefore were thought to be incapable of higher-order thought, a fact that any guy knows to be utterly false whenever he loses an argument. The same here applies for gays, who had no choice what biological parts they were born with.
A question concerning choice here is often inserted and I’m always curious for the person declaring it to explain me when they made their choice; further, that to be a legitimate choice requires that at some point they felt an equal attraction to both sexes and upon reflection and non-coercion decided to go with the opposite sex. Safe to say this point of logic rarely wins me any friends.

Curiously, this consideration of marriage as a legal contract doesn't seem to be the real issue. I’ve yet to see any signs waved in various states of apoplexy over the finer points of joint-accounts and property dispersal. Here is where the second shading to the meaning of “institution” comes in, that of a religious one, particularly as it relates to controlling fear. Here it is where people of many religions can finally come together. Whether it be Christian, Muslim, Mormon, or Jewish, conservative believers have banded together to make sure the destruction of humanity is averted by not allowing gay people to have a specific social contract. Nobody in the pro gay-marriage groups is asking for more rights than anybody else, so any posturing by the opponents who declare this point is clearly just fear-mongering. Nobody in the pro gay-marriage groups is requiring that any individual pastor, priest or televangelist be legally bound to preside over a gay marriage. Again, this is fear-mongering and fear always hides something else It is the result of a thought or feeling, not the beginning of one. It is a reaction.

The reaction is to one of equality, that insidious aspect of rational law that places people on a level playing field when it comes to socially created connections. If the field is the same then there’s no sense in feeling a need to declare that one’s difference makes them inherently superior to another. The principle of equality is the great equalizer not only in law but in human relationships. Notice that I did not say we are all the same or lack differences, equality is not about making a flatland where differences are ignored, it’s about accepting how differences cast shadows upon the field rather than raising one person above another. We are all equal by principle even in the midst of physiological differences, not because those don’t matter but because it creates no inherent hierarchy of purpose or power, the latter is always a social creation. This fear of equality has been with humanity for millennia. When Jews in the Old Testament declared their god asked them to commit genocide, it was fear of equality that rode the pale horse. When Catholics and Protestants alike slaughtered each other and those deemed "heathen" throughout the Middle Ages, it was fear of equality that drove the marching hordes. When Mormons shun and cast out any who dare to question the "sacred teachings," it is bigotry that resides in the snarls and grimaces. So it is when conservatives enter the polling place and demand that gays be not allowed to enter into a contractual relationship that others have, it is fear of equality that paints the sign "God Hates Fags."

To be equal in the eyes of one another is to celebrate our differences, to look upon the person to your right and left and say there is my sister/brother in humanity, it is a matter of engaging with others through transcendent humanistic principles rather than attempts at control. If marriage is to have any lasting social power it must change because in the end it isn’t about who you engage in contracts with, it’s about always doing so from a place of equal intent and integrity of purpose.

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May also enjoy A Well Grounded Integrity

Madness Is The Shadow Of Love

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:21:00 +0000

What began as a contemplation on the shadow qualities of love ended up being an entire composition concerning the shadows of of human existence. So I return to love, though it is only the first in a series as I attempt to show how our emotional lives and the actions arising from them are not nearly as singular an experience as is often thought.

Love is not solely an emotional response, there are any number of behaviors and mental intentions involved that indicate a person is not simply infatuated or lustful but loving. What love grows out of though is a sea of emotional responses to innumerable experiences. Behaviors become more possible as we, to a greater or lesser extent, attempt to live our principles, which themselves grew out of the familial/cultural/societal/relational dynamics of our entire lives. In all of those experiences and the connections being formed there is as much a potential for suffocation as there is for gentle holding, as much potential for obsession as there is for exuberant appreciation. This is because love is not a thing in itself, but a quality purely created out of a contextualized relational individual.

More specifically, love is often associated as a pure thing, an emotional/behavioral response to someone, notably in a romantic sense, that is completely self-sacrificing and deserves recognition as a nearly spiritual enterprise. There doesn’t need more than a few minutes perusing the romance section of a bookstore to get this flavor of fantastical idealism. This is also indicated by societal restrictions on the usage of love and the disgust often felt for those connections which don’t fall within restrictive socially-constructed mandates. Without getting too far into problematic territory, we can simply stick with those relationships which have become destructive or are no longer beneficial to all involved.

Naive simplicity would allow us to call such a connection no longer loving, but I challenge this. While it is no longer life-giving, to say it is not loving forgets the power that love possesses within the human relational personality. If we keep the principle of love as an emotional/cognitive connection with another that includes both a psychic joining such that the needs/desires of those involved become tangled together and two, a powerful projection of looking to the best way the other can manifest their highest good, with the second part arises out of the first, there is no intrinsic behavior associated.

There may be some concern over the first part of my definition, the issue of entanglement, so let me set the framework. If it is first considered that all our behavior is created out of a relational matrix and how we behaviorally manifest our personalities is due to those potential actions that become more possible as all the variables of life, both internal and external, act with us, then the relational connection of love is mental space from which the particular behavioral possibilities associated with it arise from. To see this in our lives takes only a moment of considering how we make decisions when we are doing so in connection to those in our lives, the greater the strength of the connection the more influence it has on our process. This happens in our hobbies and so on as well, as anyone who has suddenly found themselves enjoying something they hitherto had not because their partner does, can recognize that love pulls out of us potentials that were not available previously.

Love carries a great deal of weight because it can hold so much of our attention and that means utilizing a great deal of our mental resources creating abundant connections. A brief emotional response may touch upon a few connections in our mental web and have staying power only if the power of those connections are built upon great tragedy or other strong memory. Such a basic emotional response of frustration and anger at nearly tripping over the dog on the way to the car can create the space for zooming out of the driveway without looking and hitting another car. Imagine for a moment what the relational weight of a thing like love can do with all the memories and familial attachments and experiences created vast webs of interconnections. Imagine further all the behaviors it makes more likely to happen. Love is not in itself a holy virtue, but it possesses the possibility of enticing the best in us precisely because of the sheer strength or weight of its power in our relational minds.

The shadow of love, an often concealed behavioral potential that isn’t life-giving, is a form of madness built upon thoughts of shame and self-doubt, compelling us to seek completion and healing through use of another, rather than dwelling in the open and awareness-increasing relational space of a new set of possibilities. This shadow is the underbelly of tangled desires and the consequent desire to see what is assumed to be the best in another. When such a desire is predicated upon control and built upon a need to possess rather than freedom of authenticity, the strength of love is pulling from all the variables in an experience that are connected to insecurity and lack. There is here the notion of “you complete me” or “I need to find my missing half,” and so the associations are made with brokenness and behavior is created out of that space. Not everyone will go to outright abuse, but looking at love this way can help us see why someone can still use the term and yet act destructively and the subject of such still feel intense connectivity.

Just as our physical shadows are illuminated by light shining at a particular angle, so these shadows within our capacity for love can be seen through the light of introspection, reason and helpful analysis/meditation. When creating those connections of which love may one day be a defining characteristic, we can take moments to reflect on how it is we are holding the other in our internal lives. The difficulty is not in becoming entangled with another, such is the reality of our existence as relational creatures. Where our behavior remains in the capacity of love as a profound source of life-giving action is in the exhibition of dedication to free expression and deep respect for any and all involved. Rather than being in need of completion where the shadow would have us think we can’t walk at all without the other, we can instead look at our lives as journeys of which the path we are on is widened by those we connect with and therefore capable of touching upon that much more of potential experience. Love in it’s life-giving capacity broadens our awareness of what we are capable of and so it is that we find greater expressions of our freedom.

Bringing Light To The Shadows Of Our Potential Behavior

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:25:00 +0000

As a child and, let’s be honest, as an adult too, I was and am fascinated by my shadow. No, not the Jungian shadow of my psyche, though definitely that as well, but my physical shadow, that strange creature following me everywhere and only ever noticed when light is blazing at a particular angle upon me. Despite this fascination I still often forget that it’s there, my constant companion, the always-present hazy mimicry of my body. That a shadow is inevitable under certain circumstances doesn’t seem to lessen the initial interest nor diminish the fright caused by seeing it, having forgotten it’s just what it is and not some foul creature sneaking up on us.

We live in a cause/effect universe, our brains offering up upon the platter of the mind a constant stream of connected events creating story after story after story, often at such an unconscious level we are unaware until something changes. Research, for instance, indicates that we’re far more likely to get into an auto accident when closer to our home than driving elsewhere, the reason being one of comfort in a projected understanding of an unchanging situation. We believe we simply know what is going on at all times around us because we’ve driven the route so often and nothing has happened before, making us susceptible to running into things that are suddenly different.

There’s a lesson here. The differences surprise us because while our brains are great at creating narratives these stories only ever capture a selection of the variables we’re capable of being aware of. Our startle response reacts to abrupt changes in our environment, but it doesn’t provide data to ascertain just what the issue is. We rely on our, until that moment, reliable narratives to guide us. It’s why some people can see a picture of Jesus on a piece of toast and others continue to slather jam all over without blinking. Our narratives, cobbled together from the familial/cultural/societal/relational dynamics of our entire lives, shape the action potentials for all the behavior open to us.

Imagine for a moment all the potential behaviors existing as a flat plane of possibility. As each relational connection occurs, from childhood onward, there are sections of behavior that rise up and become more likely to happen. If we look, for example, at emotions as manifested energy potential, we can see that they make certain behaviors more likely to happen than others. A simple trip down memory lane will suffice for anyone to encounter a situation where an action they did was out of the ordinary but occurred because of a particular emotional response. We yell at a friend or lover coming home from a frustrating day at work. Or more kindly, feeling loved and accepted because of an interaction that morning with a friend or lover we don’t feel the same consternation when confronted with work drama or being cut off while driving. The exact opposite reaction would have more likely occurred in the past in both of these situations, but because of the initial emotional setting our behavior went down a different path. We can no more stop our emotional responses than we can stop the earth from spinning on its axis. What we can do is bring to consciousness through introspection and training a greater appreciation for the inner connections being made with every emotional response.

Incidentally this is why I attempt, to varying degrees of success, to wait a good half-day to a full day before responding to a letter or comment online that particularly incensed me. I am not ashamed by my tendency at times to attack as if personally done wrong, it’s part of who I am, but it’s not something I care to act upon in light of my highest good.

For every response that happens there are any number of others that could have happened if circumstances, internal and external, had been different. This is not about judgment but about being aware of the extent to which our fantastical notions of free-will have no support. Rather than selecting from a place above everything the particular behavior we’re going to do, it arises from the sea of potential behaviors we each of us have at our disposal because of the contexts of our lives. This is why our ideas and perspectives are so important to acknowledge and understand, for they too, like our emotions, are part of the breadth of phenomena we call our mental lives. Each and every one shifts that plane of possibility, raising a selection of potential behavior above another or lowering another set.

Our shadow is the behavior we attempt to tell ourselves doesn’t exist within us, those actions built upon guilt and shame and self-doubt that reside close as a breath and yet often without our knowing it. Here is the power residing in increased awareness. Just as shadows exist when we shine a light at a particular angle, so the light of our introspection/reason and meditation can display for us the shadows of our better selves, those behaviors that feel later as if they were from someone else and yet honesty compels us to accept that they exist within us as well. Our journey is not to destroy our shadows but to shine a light and see them for what they are, potentials but not fatalistically inevitable.

We are not bound to any single moment of our lives, any more than our thoughts can be judged by any single instantiation. We are a relational dynamic and it is the trajectory of our consciousness that defines the quality of our lives. Our shadows are our companions, but it is in the light that we see how very much more we are than that.

The Busy-ness Of Being

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:20:00 +0000

There’s an old comedy skit (don’t remember who originally did it) about a psychologist/doctor in an office and a line of patients outside. As each patient comes through they receive help and as they go the doctor begins exhibiting the same symptoms that the patient had. By the third or fourth person the doctor has several physical tics, shouting all manner of phrases and anything else the writer decided to come up with. Finally a pregnant woman walks in and the doctor runs from the office screaming.

In the relational schema of existence put forward by Siegel, there are brains, minds and relationships coinciding with the physiological mechanism, regulatory process and the sharing of the flow of energy and information (Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology). We bring to each connection our brains and bodies but it is in the inter-flow soup of energy and information within the relationship that behavior is built out of. With each person we come into contact with we are no longer the same person that existed before, changes, usually subtle, have occurred in our brain, actions that were less likely to happen now may be more likely and our thoughts/emotions are now charged along a different route than before meeting.

When we lived on farms or small communities it was a process largely dealt with fairly easily, but social media has increased our connections to a degree of near-infinite capacity, regardless of how well our brains can take it all in. Recently this reality has been weighing heavily upon me, struggling as I sometimes do to come up with the next piece of writing or find the energy to engage with one more person or work on the projects languishing in bytes in a folder buried on my Mac. The sheer enormity of life comes crashing down, previously held at bay by ignorance of its impending tidal wave. Add in events like what has recently occurred in Boston and there comes a threat of emotional shut-down.

A common point of advice in my field is to “take a mental health day,” largely consisting of getting away from it all and focusing on healing the self. Vacations are often characterized this way for most people. They are welcome gaps in the unstoppable inundation of information and taking on of human connections that we all do. Rather than looking at such times as gaps though, I want to refocus them as personal points of grounding. The information hasn’t stopped in these “mental health days.” Mobile phones are likely still glued to our hands, computers are up and running, a show or movie is being watched, some form of public interaction ends up occurring. We don’t get away from the information and relationships so much as shift our intentional focus.

Still requiring further research as to the mechanisms of its constitution, is the notion that mental life, particularly that of attention, can shape the firing of our neurons as much as the reverse is true. This makes intuitive sense to most, but as even a cursory overview of the study of physics indicates, our intuition of things is often not a good place to get an accurate understanding of the universe. However, there is good reason and research to support such a notion, at least in its general application so we can move forward while still remaining wary of declaring anything absolute. Suffice to say, the way we interact within our relational dynamics will shape our future behavior, in particular the attentional focus we apply to any given situation.

As I noted before, the enormity of life was held at bay through ignorance. The sheer magnitude of the connections I have and most of us have don’t ever go away nor did they pop into existence all at the same time to squash us like bugs, they are simply not always at the top of our attention list. A good thing too else we’d be mentally liquified and unable to act at all. Instead of relying on this unconscious safety mechanism, we can attempt to raise it in consciousness and apply it more intentionally. Whatever is being done, do it with the utmost of attention. Whoever is in front of you, give them the greatest degree of focus that can be brought. Yes, this sounds like common wisdom of planning and organizing but common sense notions are often forgotten for being so common.

The beauty of the human creature is our ability to connect with, love and empathically concern ourselves with others even when we are not physically close to them, as is the case when tragedies occur in communities far removed from our own. It is a good and precious thing to be aware of, this connective process and the altruistic behavior flowing out of it. The incredible power of this, however, is not something that can be maintained intentionally every hour of every day. Sometimes it’s good and well to remember that a “mental health day” isn’t about getting away from it all but about refocusing on what’s right in front of us.

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Faith: Integrity Within Relational Uncertainty

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:45:00 +0000

As a follow-up to A Well-Grounded Integrity, the notion of faith has recently come front and center in my life, both in the nature of what it is and how it may be put to use in ways different than my fundamentalist days. Faith for the religious dogmatist is a means of acquiring knowledge, a relational process between believer and deity that allows for the imparting of information called revelation such that is not available to those without their particular faith structure. There are numerous difficulties with this that I’ve written about before and will offer a redone version here soon, but what I want to focus on here is the relational quality of faith.

Faith in more liberal-minded evangelical writings will often be equated with trust and of course that trust is predicated upon the relationship between believer and deity so essentially we’re back where we started. However, now there’s been an introduction of a new word, needlessly confusing the issue. At least it’s confusing within that context, but it need not be if we step outside the traditional view of deity and place it in a context of a more progressive spirituality. Here, god becomes more of a conceptual holding term rather than a person or specific separate force. For further clarification on this idea I’ve written about it in The God That Is There and Nowhere.

In this context, faith can retain its relational dynamic but rather than directing one’s attention to a god “out there,” separate and mysterious, the relationship is found to be an internal one. As I mentioned concerning betrayal and the breaking of trust in Your Partner Is Not A Sleeper Cell, if we begin looking at trust as a quality we identify within ourselves then the breaking of one’s word becomes an indication of the other person’s character, not a reflection upon the brokenness, foolishness or stupidity of the deceived. Here then is where I want to continue with trust and faith.

Stephen Batchelor notes in Buddhism Without Beliefs: “Self-confidence is not a form of arrogance. It is trust in our capacity to awaken. It is both the courage to face whatever life throws at us without losing equanimity, and the humility to treat every situation we encounter as one from which we can learn.” Integrity is about finding strength in the acknowledgment of one’s own presence and power with the constant appreciation for the inherent inability to know everything or even to know every aspect of a single situation.

If we were to take just a moment to consider the basic social interaction of a conversation, no matter the topic, and then mentally construct the variables involved we’d be astounded at the amount we don’t know. A conversation is not simply about the two (to keep this “simple”) involved but each and every interactive piece of data in each of their lives, from their familial upbringing and the ideas and emotional paradigms being utilized often unconsciously to their education and relationships with fellow students and professors informing them of what was important to focus on and how to engage in dialogue to what they ate that morning or how they slept or the status of their current relationships. None of us exist in a box of our own making, we are and are within a relationally interactive existence.

Trust here for Batchelor is faith in our ability to awaken our conscious selves to a broader appreciation of life’s web-like reality, to be grounded in the confidence that appreciation brings and humbly interact with every new situation from a position of knowing something can be learned. The trust is a relationship we have with ourselves and by self then is meant the trinity of relationships existing between brain/mind/relationships as articulated by Daniel Siegel. Even at the basic level of self there is still a relational existence. Faith and trust here can be interchangeable and lead to a deeper understanding of integrity where “Ethical integrity is not moral certainty. A priori certainty about right and wrong is at odds with a changing and unreliable world, where the future lies open, waiting to be born from choices and acts.”

Faith is not certainty in the face of the unseen or a means of dogmatizing one’s opinion but a locus of being comfortable with life’s changing dynamic. None of us are the exact same person that woke up this morning, every experience we have, every relationship however ordinary or basic we interacted with today, has changed our neural maps and made some behavior more likely to happen than others in the future. “You are what you eat” was a slogan from a by-gone era of dietary care but of greater strength is “you are what you relate to.” Faith is then upon this foundation a mental act, an intentional force based on recognizing one’s relational existence and the inherent uncertainty bound within it.

In every word we use, in every act we do, there is a temptation to retreat into the dogmatic version of faith that inculcates us from criticism and places us in a realm wholly unconnected to the natural world. While this mentality is most easily associated with supernatural beliefs and traditional religious dogma, it can also exist as much in the mind of a person dedicated to logic and reason or an adherent to a particular spiritual fad. “Ethical integrity is threatened as much by attachment to the security of what is known as by fear of the insecurity of what is unknown.” (Batchelor) It is not the beliefs themselves that are at issue on this point but the association made between their articulation and whether or not they are considered above critical consideration. There is an attachment here of identifying oneself to an absolute idea rather than resting upon faith in the reality of a relational changing universe.

Like most considerations of ethical behavior, it is based on a growing appreciation and knowledge of the human condition. If we treat people from a position of faith in our relational existence and look upon each face as a connected source of further understanding then dogmatism and the fear that inevitably rides with it fades. When we dwell in the faith provided by our relationship with everything then each person and connection becomes a space for awakening.

Your Partner Is Not A Sleeper Cell

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 19:25:00 +0000

Cellphones, GPS units, the ubiquity of cameras, phone applications that can track where people at to near pinpoint accuracy. These are merely the personal technologies that the general populace has to expand an already over-burdened anxious mind with more information than it can take. When considerations are made concerning this type of technology at the national stage and how we are inundated with analysis of its meaning for our rights and privileges, with spy satellites, street cameras, and drones, there has come to exist a mentality that everyone is and should be watched, monitored and minutely considered in their every action. This social spy-state of affairs insinuates itself into our consciousness and finds itself manifesting in individual relationships, both friendly and romantic, such that trust is no longer an issue of identity but a contingent commodity that begins at a loss and rarely rises to a positive.

Trust is an elusive and amazing feature of relationships, often mistaken for being given only in the retrospect when it has been broken. By that I mean it is rare for someone to declare “I give you my trust” at the beginning of a relationship, but quite more often is heard “I trusted you and you betrayed me” or some facsimile. We’ve all been there, including myself, and I have written before on apologies (The Soft Tyranny of I’m Sorry) and forgiveness (The Inner Projection Of Forgiveness). Rather than delving into those topics at this time, I want to get further into the mindset of wariness that so permeates our human interactions. Trust seems an issue of identity, we implicitly trust or endorse the honesty of the individual in front of us unless painfully obvious clues lead us to think otherwise, accepting at the very least on trust that the words issuing from their lips mean a particular thing or reference similar thoughts that we ourselves carry. Trust at this basic level is so pervasive that we rarely give it a conscious thought, leading as I noted a few sentences previously that it is often only in retrospect we realize we’ve gone and trusted. This basic trust is the backbone of all interactions, without it we’d get nothing done or at minimum our communication would devolve into such pedantic utterances we’d never make any progress in conversation. This backbone however is not without some spots of concern.

Those points of concern are precisely what is brought out, danced about and peddled, often for monetary gain, by fear-mongering individuals, organizations and news networks. Shark attacks rarely happen and yet “Shark Week” in the United States is one of the most watched orgies of vicarious thrills on television. Despite abuse and kidnapping occurring far more often by relatives than by strangers (and frankly even these numbers are abysmally low given the sheer number of children out there), playgrounds and grass yards in front of houses are no longer places of enjoyment but anxiety-ridden geographic locations of predatory menace. Fueled by ignorance as to just what sex offenses often are or the context of their occurrence (not at all minimizing the very real horror of the crimes committed under this category), potential dates are looked up on national sex-crime databases open to the public or if you’re really wanting to give yourself a scare you can simply see if one is located near your house, never mind how long they’ve been living there without any difficulty at all. I won’t even go into Google, that social standard of search programs that seems like the holy grail for assuaging or stoking parental fears previous to a child’s date, regardless of how long that child has been an adult.

All of this fear, anxiety and concern is like social molasses, making it difficult to move around let alone swim or god forbid frolic with abandon. Let me be clear here that I am not promoting the abject abnegation of rationality for the rainbows and bunnies of a fantasy world where everyone is completely altruistic and one need never concern themselves with safety. That’s as clearly ridiculous as the opposite existence of constant fear. What I am here noting is being aware of how relating to the world skews our perceptions and this is far more about ourselves than the person we’re engaged with. I’ll back up and explain since this thought is a bit of a leap from where I was at.

Trust, like forgiveness, is an inner projection of a self-narrative. Just as when trust is broken and we feel saddened and morose, often acting out in emotionally self-abusive ways as to how we fell for what now appears as clear fraud, it is this notion of lack and insufficiency that is at the core of the hurt, not the precipitating event. What hurts in betrayal has more to do with an identification one creates with an image of the betrayed, a person stupid and lacking in judgment. Rather than seeing the situation as a source of introspection and reflection on what could be done differently, an all-encompassing identity is made with the lie that is the betrayed. So with trust when acting from a place of wariness and focus on ferreting out potential betrayal we create an environment of lack and emotional insufficiency. This then allows the other person’s actions to be given a greater power over the creation of our self-narrative than our own principles.

In a basic scenario of broken trust the betrayed has two options: one, they can accept the behavior as indicative of the person doing it and reflect upon the exchange to determine what may have been missed or not seen clearly and use this information for future encounters with others; two, fall into despair at the feelings of brokenness and consider themselves foolish for having fallen for the manipulation or deception. The first option is far healthier and less personally destructive and seems more likely to occur when we begin from a position of wholeness and honest self-appraisal. The latter option seems far more likely to happen when we begin from an environment of wariness and constant anxiety, slipping into a story of personal lack and shame because we were already there to begin with!

We are left here then with patterns of behavior to engage with when dealing with any prospective new social connection, from the simple acquaintance to the earth-moving romantic. There is nothing wrong with being aware of other people in our lives, that’s rather the point of having relationships, but there is no necessity and is likely even toxic to engage with these connections from a position of focusing on betrayal. That other person’s behavior says far more about them than it does about you and it is a means of interacting with reality that we can, with intentional awareness, either take on as our own identity or learn from and move on with openness to life and experiences based in a secure self-acknowledgment.

Relationship: A Model for Spiritual Development

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:41:00 +0000

Once questions begin they build on each other, providing a certain lift or push in the direction of discovery but no real map of where one is going. There can be a pondering of the future, but no directions laid out of easy left and right spring out of the void from which imagination pulls every other thought. When the term “God” is once determined as having no inherent substance, no central form that is distinct from human thought and intent, the once easy directive within religious fundamentalism is replaced with wary curiosity. From whence does such a concept come and why does it persist? There are as many answers to this as perhaps there are definitions of “God.” I hardly seek to answer definitively and frankly I find the question not quite legitimate anyway.

I’ve written before in “Answers To A Question: Yes, No, Maybe” concerning how the meaning of “God” is so often assumed rather than questioned from a position of skepticism or agnosticism. We are trapped in the social homogenization of an idea, suffocating in our lack of inquiry and drowning in the shallowness of our imagination. Rather than beginning with this social simplicity it is far better to immediately question what one means when using the term, embarking perhaps on a journey of rebelliousness but ultimately one of greater concern.

If the Muslim were to ponder the historical validity of jihad rather than unquestioningly accept the dictates of a singular imam, would there be less violence? If the Christian were to investigate the notion that their parents are merely parroting ideas they have never questioned and thus find themselves doing the same, would the unbroken line of familial authority be broken? If the believer in mystical energy suckling upon the media-hyped teat of all manner of ego-focused gurus peddling their wares were to engage in a more scientific questioning of data rather than blind acceptance, would we have less anxiety? I think the answer to these questions is a profound yes and the authoritative overreach of inbuilt cultural standards would largely crumble, no doubt this being a central reason why such behavior has yet to happen on a global scale. Rather than a resultant chaos though, I posit the occurrence of a greater appreciation for relationships rather than the structure of them, of shared phenomenology rather than forms of power.

By relationship it is meant the basic building block of all communication as communal union, a term denoting the flow of energy and its usual manifestation in the form of information (see Daniel Siegel’s work The Handbook to Interpersonal Neurobiology). Note that there is no form here assumed, only the flow, only the communal aspect of the human connection with the universe both in the immediate experience of basic physical sensation and in the broader existence provided by our imaginative potential and cognitive constructions. Many books have and continue to be written in an attempt to describe why the notion of “God” continues to exist, created as it was in a period of technological simplicity and ignorance. Like the phlogiston, should not “God” have disappeared as well, a dead idea in the face of the constant changing reality of a world of instantaneous communication and the full extent of knowledge at one’s fingertips? Certainly there is some truth to the notion of some definitions no longer serving us, of some ideas associated with divinity that have been supplanted by the growth of our understanding, though just what those definitions are I leave open for this entry for further discussion. However, underlying all the forms “God” takes, from the happily mystical to the condemning patriarch, there is at the center a relationship between humanity and existence being played out.

In Frank Herbert’s The Jesus Incident, there is a short dialogue between a poet and Ship where the poet is asked why there is a god, the poet answering with: “God is the source of information, not of decisions. Decisions are human. If God makes decisions, they are human decisions.” Here is the inspiration for the current entry, a declaration of humanity’s relation to movement, one where direction or decisions are predicated upon understanding or information and here then is where “God” still finds a pervasive hold upon us. There need not be a devolution into the supposed glory of ignorance for “God” to exist, this is only true if the intent is one of power and control, of patriarchal demands and hierarchical structure mandating purpose before thought. Rather, in the pregnant questions of a yearning for understanding there lies the potential birth of expanding knowledge and tentative constructs or narratives. Where “God” continues to pop up is precisely at the edges of our understanding, but rather than making a leap into the unknown it can provide an impetus to proceed further, to propel oneself on the firm ground of the inter-relational reality of our existence, a naturalized spirituality if you will.

We can, like many already do, ponder the origins of “God” and ask why it still exists but this assumes a particular definition that not only do I find suspect but is not required of me to take on for myself. There is undoubtedly great questions to be answered here and such academic inquiries I am all for, but this can often lend itself to a greater emphasis on form than is perhaps healthy. Back of form is idea and back of that is a fundamental union that we all are bubbling blips being manifested out of. If we begin here, in togetherness and shared humanity, we stand a greater chance of creating better forms of evolving grandeur rather than static controls. In the reality of relationships there is a model of spiritual development in which no one is left behind or shamed.

A Well-Grounded Integrity

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:50:00 +0000

When I contemplate upon integrity I am reminded immediately of the first agreement noted by Don Miguel Ruiz in his book The Four Agreements, “be impeccable with your word.” As anybody will attest to, who have spent any more than a fleeting moment with me in conversation or debate, I am often parsing phrases and words out to determine as concretely as possible what is meant by a person’s speech. This is done not only as a personal projection of my own principled agreement with word usage but also based on a recognition that how we describe or create the narratives of our lives provides the structure upon which and through which we choose our behavior. This is true from the broad stories we tell of our families and social connections to the smallest of phrases in the slightest of interactions with others.

While our words do not encapsulate the entirety of our lives they are the means by which we socially organize our experiences, have the unconscious become conscious and form the dialogue that is back of every relationship we create, from the random platonic to the long-term romantic. The stories we tell then, based as they are in the bio-physiological reality of our physical union with the universe, will determine the shape of our connections and whether they will serve the purpose of growth in ever-increasing awareness or keep us asleep to the inherent potential for greatness that lies within each of us.

This is the ground upon which our integrity rests, the conscious acknowledgement of our interconnected and reciprocal relationship with all things/people and the belief that as we endeavor to awaken to a greater appreciation for existence so will we do so, thought breeding action and returning upon itself in a reciprocity of union. This is the principled means of defining a healthy confidence, Stephen Batchelor noting that, “Self-confidence is not a form of arrogance. It is trust in our capacity to awaken. It is both the courage to face whatever life throws at us without losing equanimity, and the humility to treat every situation we encounter as one from which we can learn.” (Buddhism Without Beliefs)

Notice that with a solid ground the result is equanimity though this should not be confused with placidity. As I’ve noted before in Yes These Are The Emotions You’re Looking For, our capacity for resiliency in the midst of emotional upheaval is not found in the removal of disparate emotions or to ignore the power of their influence but to intentionally accept that emotions are an identification of the presence of change and a pointer to what we upon appraisal find important. The performer balancing on the ball does not do so by standing still but by making small subtle changes in their posture to flow with the forces coming up through the ball, recalibrating their center in a reciprocal relationship. To do such in life requires a convergence of word, deed and thought, where each is a supportive block through which and upon which the others manifest. In Buddhism it is referred to as Dharma, the living out of the principles given by Gautama for the purpose of ethical non-attached living. “Dharma practice cannot be abstracted from the way we interact with the world. Our deeds, words, and intentions create an ethical ambience that either supports or weakens resolve.” (Buddhism Without Beliefs)

Integrity is grounded practice, an emergent property based on the acknowledgment of a particular narrative, identification with the principles of growth which give that narrative structure and an intentional respect for the reality of an existence for which every word and deed we utter and do have consequences of which we will largely be unaware. This is not an abdication of contemplating an objective ethical life, but an appreciation for living in a world the complexity of which will likely always be in its fullest sense outside of our ability to grasp. When we act from integrity we do so with an intellectual/emotional empathic relatedness to all the creatures we encounter. The dwelling place of empathy allows for no space for ego-centeredness or projection of a self without context or the declaration of principle without humanity like the absolutist and the adherent of dogmatism. “While rooted in empathy, integrity requires courage and intelligence as well, because significant ethical choice entails risk. And while we cannot know in advance the consequences of the choices we make, we can learn to become more ethically intelligent.” (Buddhism Without Beliefs)

Our words/deeds send vibrations out into the universe, dissipating with time but no less important for their diminishing strength, seen most clearly in the immediate aftermath of our choice and yet even then there still exists consequences of which we are unaware. The military and politicians have a word for this called “blowback,” the returning repercussions of events put into practice of which the original actors are unaware. We will never be capable of plotting out the entirety of the consequences of our actions. The pursuit of increasing awareness, based on the belief that by doing so will inevitably lead to an awakening, can strengthen our humility as we courageously understand more of reality and the greater appreciation for risk entailed in every action.

To be impeccable in word is to live a life of integrity out of which we build the structural strength for the continued practice of being impeccable. Practice is constant movement and never stagnation. In an ever-changing universe in which the karma of cause-effect relationships is cosmically complex, our willingness to live a life of integrity is commensurate with our commitment to being awoken to an ever-greater though still tentative grasp of understanding the nested reality.

The Nature of Love

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:29:00 +0000

Popular sayings and cliches abound, songs are written as odes to and diatribes against, lives are made and destroyed in its embrace and the forms it takes are at the center of a great deal of social debate and religious theological musings. The nature of love and its practice guides, shapes, cajoles and inspires a host of behavior and yet none of it brings us any closer to an understanding of just what it is. Like referring to sleep as that thing we do when we’re not awake, noting the behavior inspired by identification with love certainly gives us much to discuss concerning that behavior but isolating the commonality is a bit more difficult. I’ve often over the years, usually from the ideologically conservative corner, heard that love is a term over-used and marketed to the point of absurdity. There may indeed be some truth to this, a word can come to include so many disparate things that it in fact becomes meaningless except as a pointer or directional word, always guiding away from it and never towards and as such we rarely stop to question just what it is we’re talking about when we breath out the term.

What makes the situation even more compellingly frustrating is that there exists no commonly understood definition of emotion either and while certainly love may not be consonant fully as an emotion, it definitely is bound within it to some degree and yet this provides little in the way of helpful direction. With this in mind I came across a discussion of emotion by Daniel Siegel as it relates to attachment in his book The Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology. When considered from an elevated perspective, there is a point of consilience amongst the various descriptive uses to which emotion is put, that being linkage of differentiated parts. Whether it be the linking of child to caregiver in psychology or person to tribe in sociology or neural engram to engram in neurophysiology, emotion is the process of linking these disparate and differentiated aspects of systems into a coherent whole. How this then is applied to love as a particular instantiation of emotional energy is where I want to draw focus to.

I have loved many people, just as I am quite certain those reading this have loved many as well. I love my biological family, I love my friends and lovers, those who are no longer in my life and those who are merely tangentially connected to it. I love the song I Won’t Give Up by Jason Mraz and how when the subject of the song is shifted from a singular person in front of you to humanity as a whole there is only an expansion of meaning rather than confusion, a quickening desire to not give up even as the skies get rough, to make a difference and not to break or burn, learning to bend and acknowledge who each of us is and what each of us isn’t and who I am even in the midst of it all. All of this, all of these manifestations of love are encapsulated within a singular term and yet at no time is there a creation of a flatland of feeling, a singularity to how such a feeling of love is to be felt, allowing for gradations to the warp and weft of the land. Some may lament that I have merely succumbed to the over-use of love, noting it when in fact I merely mean “like.” There is some legitimate concern here though personally I find myself still being able to not only use the term “like” but differentiate it from my usage of “love.” The reason for this is the strength of the intent back of the term.

If love, as an emotion and therefore process of linking disparate aspects of a system, is here to be used holistically (utilizing Ken Wilber’s terminology) then the linkage I am referring to here is that which is found in the interconnected holism providing the ground of all being. This is not some declaration of an actually existent underlying force, except in so far as energy can be applied here, but a means of organizing cognitively one’s placement in the universe. Consciousness as we know it is in no small part an arisen property, one that requires a particular biological and environmental structure to become manifest. Whether this structure taps into a force of consciousness or whether it is created out of it is open to debate and not the point here. What is at issue is that we human beings, possessed as we are with our form of consciousness, reside in a special place as the universe creating its own intent. As a beautiful person in my spiritual practices class noted, the interrelation of all things is like being placed in a room of perfectly placed mirrors so as you look you see yourself go on infinitely no matter where your gaze rests. I would add that as you set your sight upon any particular image there is yet found one more thing unnoticed before, some variation unseen until that moment. This here is love, the linkage of differentiated aspects of the universe through the reciprocity of being grounded and yet projecting outward into infinity all the potential manifestations of that being-ness.

I use reciprocity here because as we see through studies in attachment, the sense of being we all possess is bound within the triumvirate energy structure of biology, environment and relationship, where an understanding of any requires the inclusion of the others through the variations of their interconnection. When we love we are not simply noting the casting outward of a feeling but acknowledging a recognition of union amongst differentiation. What love is, is a counter to disillusionment, the opposite of dissociation, the cure to ennui and it knows only expansion. When we see union as the fundamental ground of our being-ness, this love then provides a space for all the behavior that stems from it, life-giving and respectful, tolerant of differences without being obsequious to moral complacency via ethical subjectivism. This also provides more nuance to the simplistic declaration some make that to love others one must first love themselves. It is not so much that one must love their self and then others as if in a linear cause-effect relationship, rather to dwell in a recognition of mutually held identification with universal union. Differences become variations of unity rather than pieces to be held up as showing separation.

When loving another then it is within this unity, within this holistic universe and it is provided by the conscious recognition of an interconnected existence. We celebrate in all their nuances the person in front of us just as we celebrate those around us and she or he who stares back in a mirror. Love is joyful exuberance within the process of this celebration, bound with the threads of our interconnected nested reality. We hold that space for ourselves and others and by doing so find that love brings peace.

Return Of The Ex and Hope For Rebirth

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:11:00 +0000

The pain has subsided; the angry letters written, destroyed, rewritten again, ripped up and burned; the drunken one-nighters have passed and many gallons of tears and rage have flowed on down rivers of chocolate. If you’re lucky perhaps you went through only one of these. Depending on one’s predilection towards emotional hari-kari perhaps all of the above and more were wallowed in. This is not to disparage the reaction to a break-up, but to put it in perspective and like any painful event there is a need for some humor even in the midst of sorrow, because the joke ultimately is, with shaking of head and rueful chuckle, that this too shall pass and all the time spent on ruminating over past hurts and present feelings of rejection or betrayal will be small and slight in comparison to the vast amount of time that came before and will come after. The loss is often so large, so ridiculously painful, not because the other person wasn’t worth it (though let’s face it, there really isn’t anybody worthy of invoking the feeling of soul-spasming pain felt by romantic loss) but because in a very real sense the world created by the connection was torn away. This isn’t poetic license, this touches upon attachment and how our minds work, giving us a bit of insight into why even after all the tears and sorrow there’s a part of us that leaps for joy at the possibility the ex may return.

David Chalmers has spoken of the “extended mind,” a conceptualization of human mental activity that broadens the understanding of mind to include those objects or people with which we have a relationship or connection thereby extending the practice of the mind from a singularity to a multiplicity. Often this extension concerns having something else take over and do more efficiently (at least hopefully so) what the mind used to do, as is the case for smart phones and computers with us no longer having to use up mental space for phone numbers, directions, etc. This extension also encompasses other people and provides a means of constructing just why with certain relationships taking place over time there come moments of finishing thoughts, intuitively grasping what the other is feeling as they enter a room and even taking on certain manners of speech and behavior. “You are like the company you keep” is more than just a saying, it is a mental equivalency, as our minds take on and incorporate into the so-called individual world all those variables referred to usually as people and shape a new narrative and structure of the self. I’ve spoken before of this transcendent need within us to expand by necessity our connections, either by religious or personal connections. This natural and inevitable creation of attachment is seen in the yearning a child has for their care-giver, in the charging maelstrom of neurons exploding for human touch, in the bond of parent to child and in our protest behavior as anxiety breaks open due to feelings of loss. This dependency is not, however, a loss of freedom but the means by which we interact with an increasingly complicated world of evolving societal and cultural forms. To return to Chalmers, we have a need to organize our emotions/thoughts, which cannot be done within a context-free universe as emotions/thoughts are the emergent entity out of that very context and so our minds reach out to extend the self and find avenues for their development.

There are any number of points of advice peddled about, in magazines and books and most certainly from our friends and family, as to whether when or if the ex returns we should reengage and start over. I’m not here to offer pithy sayings though at times I’ll do so for the sake of fun. What I am here for is to provide a potential context or structure to help each person in the decision-making process. Doing so begins with acknowledging the reality of the nests or baskets of our existence and with humility understand that we never make a decision all on our own as if plucking from the sky a free-floating behavioral possibility. That former romantic connection or friendship, however much they may have hurt us, provided the means for pain or did not live up to their potential integrity, still provided for that time together a means of constructing the experience of life; the stronger the emotional bond the strong the connection must have felt and still likely has a hold on us. This is not because we are weak, as some unfortunate people have mentioned of those involved in abusive relationships, but because our minds don’t operate outside of context, even when that context is not of an objective life-giving form. Standing in the waters of a river you’re going to get wet and no amount of believing otherwise, no amount of looking only for the good things, is going to remove the increasingly strong undertow. In fact, even the removal of oneself from it is not simply a matter of stepping out of it, as there must be a ground to get to, a branch offered to grasp. Being able to look at one’s emotional life and consequent mental creations from a broader and more awakened perspective allows us to see all those connections which provide the means or space to allow us to step out and away.

Once having accepted the inevitability of creating attachments and feeling their pull even when thought to have gone away, the next nest encompasses value and is the legitimately powerful side of the positive-focusing that I irksomely noted above. Like a mashed and crumpled dried-out sponge, the emotional waters of previous relationships can quickly return us to a form waiting to be reborn. By projecting forward the highest form of our needs, not just attachment but honest and open connections, not just anyone but someone who is walking alongside on their own path and by doing so opens up vistas of growth we had hitherto not known, we can take note of when such occurs and becomes manifest in our lives. When that former lover/friend returns we can stand in the waters of that familiar stream of emotions and step out of it by grasping the branch of the highest values we want in our lives, strengthened and given form by the communities in which we are involved. Then we can look at what is being offered and reject from a place of strength that old companion of lack and pain and move on into connections of plenty and joy.

Principles of Polyamory

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 22:45:00 +0000

As has been noted with increasing repetition, I practice polyamory (“poly” as shorthand). Defined simply as multiple love, the social practice of this idea is found in consciously and intentionally engaging in multiple relationships of which all are aware in the spirit of openness and honesty. Much has been said in popular culture in American recently on t.v. shows and magazine articles and began in no small part with Dan Savage’s non-monogamy or monogam-ish discussion. I have no desire to go into a debate concerning the roots of polyamory or get bogged down in what I consider to be ridiculous and spurious debates concerning whether or not human beings as a species are biologically prone towards polyamory or monogamy, as this almost invariably devolves into an over simplistic conflation of biology and culture. That people are capable of loving a multitude is so obvious as to be rank absurdity to deny it. We love our family members, we love our friends, we continue to love those who have passed and much to our chagrin we continue to love even those who have hurt us horribly. The particular form that love takes is of course different with all of these, from the poetic license taken to express one’s romantic emotional explosions to the other extreme of intense anger covering the still persistent love for those having done us wrong. All of that could take up multiple entries and likely will in the future. Here and now the discussion is on just what it is to practice polyamory, not behaviorally per se but principally. Far too often when I initially entered the hot-bed of sexual depravity (yes that’s sarcasm) that is polyamorous culture I was faced with a steady stream of debates concerning just what is and what is not polyamory. After a time passed and heartache required that I determine just what it was I was doing with myself, I figured out that the discussion too often made the same mistake the research on human sexual practices makes, conflating two different things. In this case, the confusion stemmed from conflating principle and action or form. Rather than deciding what was consonant with all forms, debate would center on triads and quads, living with or separate households, on and on in a constant and emotionally-charged fruitless debate. While some of this seems inevitable in a so-called counter-culture movement struggling for its own identity, after a while I just got really tired of it.

So, in an attempt to answer the question of what poly is for myself I will thrust my ego-laden opinion all over the Internet and then go hide in a bunker with whatever friends and/or lovers would like to come with. Let me first declare that I do not like and try to remove from my vocabulary the term “alternative.” Poly is simply a means of expressing love and tenderness, appreciation and joy with and for other people. This is a transcendent desire we all as human beings can and often do share, though obviously the how of it is open to a great deal of debate. For the purposes of a discussion on principle, poly here is not looked as alternative because just what is loving others an alternative to?

1. Open/honest communication.

I’ve written before, quite recently, on how communication is a matter of communal-creation, about communion with the intent of building a community of people involved in the practice of communication. Being open is both self-expression and self-reflection, a dedication to honestly appraising one's actions, intents and desires, expressing them as clearly as possible and taking feedback in a spirit of humility though not abject acceptance of. That latter concerns not denying one's own thoughts, however much some people seem to think feedback entail inevitable agreement. In other words, feedback is part of communion, it is not about declaring the "right" view and having the other obsequiously curtail their thoughts to it, though of course this in no way removes the passion of someone’s belief. What someone says about another is in no small part often about themselves and while the community created by two or more people is an emergent relational organism, it is about whole people coming together, not separate parts attempting to make a chaotic jigsaw puzzle work itself out.

2. Willingness to intentionally pursue all emotional connections within the bounds of principle one and the negotiated comfort of all parties involved.

This is a big one juxtaposing poly from monogamy as the latter, particularly in American society, puts definitive limits as to the pursuit of emotional connections with others, however foolish that may ultimately be. The number of angry conflicts over a discussion as to how a partner can care about someone else and therefore whether that means the partner is no longer cared for is a profound source of pain that has no issue being done except in light of personal anxiety and a pie-metaphor of love (where it must be given to only one person or with a piece gone there is thus less leftover for others). This principle also indicates the difference between poly and swinging as the latter is less concerned with the deliberate pursuit of emotional connections though clearly there’s still an admission and acceptance of their occurance. The second part of this is a bit gray as the notion of comfort is nebulous, hence why I am placing these principles as one building or being nested within the other, therefore requiring the previous in fulfilling the next. Comfort is determined by open/honest communication, the communion of those parties involved and the recognition that such creates a particularly nuanced community between the relationships, one that is by necessity different than other groups as there are different people and therefore different attachments involved. This does not mean that all potential emotional attachments are of a necessary nature to be pursued, only that the intent is there to do so if desired. One of the cliches within poly is “love is infinite, time is not.” Quaint for sure but utterly true. Emotional bonds and pursuing them requires dedication and time, especially when done within open/honest communication.

3. An intentional desire to pursue the expression of relational bonds in all ways negotiated/discussed including that of a sexual bond.

This last principle is the juxtaposition between poly and monogamy, as a healthy and trust-filled monogamous couple can provide space for the deliberate pursuit of other emotional connections without damaging their own primary connection. In fact, much suffering would likely be averted if more couples would pursue love from a place of wholeness rather than anxious lack. This last principle also simply cannot exist in a healthy manner without the previous two. Without the first it just boils down to using people and manipulation. Without the second it is nothing more than rutting or swinging (I in no way want to disparage the potential ethical practice of swinging) or using others for basic physiological release. Nothing wrong with this if it's openly acknowledged and honestly practiced but it isn't poly. Notice here that like principle two, poly does not necessitate the pursuit of any and all expressions. In fact, it doesn’t even necessitate sex but rather the deliberate pursuit of expressing the relational bond in whatever way is comfortable as discussed between those involved. This may include sex, it may include touch or any number of other things openly and honestly dealt with in a community of communal communication.

These are principles only, they in no way necessitate the form of a relationship though certainly principle one will be helpful in creating a form that is both healthy and of benefit to all involved. Whether you practice polyamory or monogamy, the issue is to do so ethically and with the care of self and others constantly in focus. The key here throughout this all is a focus on openness, honesty and the pursuit of happiness without unnecessary pain and betrayal as we endeavor to not live a life of illusion or from any place other than our complete and whole nature as beautiful people.

Interest Wanes, Intention Expands

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:51:00 +0000

Communication is, as I have noted before, a communal creation. The creation is of a “relationship” between two or more parties that is greater than but not wholly other than the sum of the people involved. Looked at this way, to have a healthy relationship, to express oneself authentically with others is to first and foremost center oneself in the principle of open and honest communication. This openness is not a passive receptivity but an active intentional stance of personal expression, of pushing the metaphorical hands into the deepest mud of the soul and bringing forth the most current and fully understood aspects of oneself and how one relates to the other(s) involved. Self-honesty does not quite fully encapsulate what I’m going after here as self is only fully manifested within the relationships being created. Openness and honesty are means of relating to that communal creation through a recognition that what has been made initially by interest becomes more by intent and it is this shared reality, full of the strengths and anxieties of those involved, which must be kept at the forefront of dialogue and discourse. The what of a self-narrative is only ever fully realized in a relationship, whereas a focus on the individual is to forego enlightenment for ego worship.

This business of interest and intention is the basis for both the establishment of a relationship and a means of determining when that connection is no longer serving the needs of the parties involved. There is so much written in various magazines concerned with cheating and straying, the latter an interesting metaphor assuming the relationship is like a path of which deviation from is separation and destruction. Articles scream out the headlines of helping women figure out when their man is cheating and others attempt to explain why he does through various dubious usages of evolutionary psychology. There is, no doubt, a great deal of emotional pain and heartache, anxiety and concern over the loss of a relationship, particularly of the romantic kind, and were I able to give an easy checklist to determine the how and when of a relationship breaking I’d be certain to appear on Oprah and peddle my wares with exceeding gusto. Alas, I have no such model as the multiplicity of human behavior is not so easily categorized. Instead what I offer is a rumination on healthy relationships based on that principle of communication I began with. By focusing on what is healthy, what is good and right, we become less concerned with the negative and anxious-inducing possibilities and judge the strength of a connection not on its potential for failure but on its ability to provide a self-transformative space for growth and honest expression.

Erich Fromm in The Art of Being, notes that “The basis for any approach to self-transformation is an ever-increasing awareness of reality and the shedding of illusions.” The action of increasing one’s awareness of reality is promoted through greater understanding of one’s being-ness requiring the open and honest communication talked about leading to the dismissal of illusions. These illusions are often at the heart of what makes us anxious concerning the loss of relationships and the fear/concern over someone straying. This metaphor is one I’m being particularly struck by right now. The term “straying” evokes such strong images of a path being left, of a road being departed from, the result as is found in any number of stories one of destruction and pain. Oddly enough however, this departure is, in those very same tales, an experience of personal development. While I am not at all declaring that a loss of integrity and the breaking of one’s word to another is a good thing, I do want to note that the straying here perhaps can be focused on departing from one’s illusions. The central one of most concern here is that of any single person being able to complete another, of providing the necessary pieces to fit into every lack that the other person has, for the two to become one in anything more than a poetic sense. This illusion is particularly problematic as it is predicated on the notion of someone having a lack, of beginning a search due to the recognition of an already existent loss. Like focusing on what is potentially wrong with a relationship, the eye only sees what is negative and provides ample examples of concern for suffering. If we begin with one’s wholeness, with a person’s already existent secure place as who they are, perfect and complete as a manifestation of humanity, then what another provides is not missing pieces but a means of expanding the greatness that a person is already. The path here does not become more well-trodden, sinking everyone involved into greater depths of muck, but rather becomes wider, encompassing a greater degree of reality or increased awareness.

The illusion of being completed in another provides the foundation for all manner of anxiety and the impetus to focus on loss rather than fulfillment. If one is completed by another then a lack of integrity on their part in keeping to their word becomes more than just a lapse in judgment or an indication of their character but reflects on you as well in a reciprocal process of emotional pain. While it is well and good to consistently reflect from a place of compassion upon what various behaviors can be changed to better exhibit the values of a life-giving existence, if such reflection occurs within the space provided by the loss of their completion or destruction of their symbiosis, despair is the only result, not growth. “In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity.” (Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving) Clearly Fromm here means more than the male gender and is concerned with love, not simply in its romantic form, as a source of human expansion, of the removal of one’s focus on the feeling of lack or separation characteristic of so much of modern society, yet remaining in a place of personal integrity. Such is the nature of communal creation in open and honest communication with both self and within connections.

A partner may cheat, they may stray, but if the focus of a relationship is on the expanding quality of honest and open shared reality then their actions reflect only on their particular rivet in the road, not on who you are as a complete person. Interests change, what was once the powerful experience of the power of lust and initial neural explosion at newness, shifts and changes based on circumstance and the meandering flow of life of which we are so often caught up in rather than controlling. This is an inevitable though not fatalistic process in the art of forming relationships and provides a space for the expansion of intention, both in keeping to the principles of a life given over to expressing integrity and joyful identity but in seeing the myriad of potential connections waiting to provide the space for widening the road of one’s journey.

Foregoing Reason For Enlightenment

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 23:14:00 +0000

To keep an open mind is the standard adage of a society in desperate need to appear as if at the cutting-edge of ideological development but scared of standing for anything. In my search for a spiritual community I have plumbed the depths of Christian fundamentalism, delved shortly into studies of Catholicism, raged for a while in adolescent-like ranting within the auspices of atheism and along the way stumbled into Unitarian Universalism and most recently Science of Mind or New Thought. The latter two movements eschew the dogmatic idealism of their religious counterparts, focusing instead on a profound love of humanity and a willingness to pursue truth whatever it may lead.

Truth here is for the growing awareness of a conscious grasp of the universe, abundant in its demonstrable creative possibilities and brimming with sources for further inquiry and study. Like any movement created by people there are elements which can be problematic in the thinking as ideas are hashed out and numbers grow, creating a soup of variegated elements that by and large is truly delicious though at times may become a tad bitter. There is a tendency here as there is in any religious or spiritual movement, particularly those unfortunately labeled “new age,” to be so open to new ideas that, as one humorous take on the previously mentioned saying declared “an open mind is great but be careful that your brain doesn’t fall out.”

I’ll attempt to refrain from going into examples as undoubtedly some of them will be pet annoyances of mine and perhaps even indicate an ignorance I have about their full articulation. Instead I want to focus on a subject that has come up recently in a recurring discussion on science and the contribution it has given to humanity above or beyond that of religion. The radical perspective, often declared with an almost gleeful caricature of itself, is that all religion is evil, a position taken by the late and great Christopher Hitchens and propagated currently by Richard Dawkins among others. I won’t get into the nuanced particulars of their thinking, as that is not what I’m after here, but I will note that such a stance is not precisely a fully accurate portrayal of their thoughts however strongly they themselves will sometimes declare it so.

When facing a world that gives religion carte blanche in avoiding criticism and shielding it from all manner of ethical judgment, there is a need for those who take the opposite position if only to show the absurdity of what is going on. At the core of this position however, lies a valid point concerning epistemic validity and the truth claims of various ideas. The shield from inquiry often attached to religions, taken on with what should be self-mockery by the scandal-plagued Catholic Church and with rueful smiles by many in the new age movement, is that of being beholden only to their own form of internal self-check, removed from a social dialogue despite their fervent desire to still then be a part of and often an influential part of that very society.

Whenever a person or movement declares an internal-only source for truth there should be an immediate query as to where the surprise is or even perhaps what flavor of kook-aid is being asked to drink. This is not to gainsay the legitimacy of intuition as there are truth-claims wholly of a private nature, one’s tastes or preferences for instance and even a privately held opinion on a personal experience which, not open to criticism, is held as a cherished emotional position useful for the power of its memory. People can believe all manner of things privately and there be little in the way of consequence or even need to know or criticize by others. It is when such beliefs effect the behavior of a person towards others in any causal sense and/or when such beliefs are promoted as being legitimate for others beside that individual, there it is that we have gone beyond intuitive sense and into the realm of science in general. As a side note I find it increasingly interesting that the age of the Internet and social media seems to be pushing us more and more towards a completely social existence, one that brings at times forcefully to light every nuance of our lives. The repercussions of this for society have likely only begun to be felt.

Back to the point at hand though, let me explain what I mean by science in general as it has to do with the central issue here. There is a difference between what I refer to as science-proper, e.g. the method of science or experimental science, and science-general which is more of a philosophical position concerning humanity’s epistemic relation to the cosmos. Science-general concerns itself with the analysis of experience and operates by the principle that all experience is capable of being understood though the particular procedure for certain knowledge may need to be created (i.e. microscopes created to see cells or the theory of gravity required to grasp that central force in the universe) and all is ultimately shareable within the nest of humanity’s shared biological ontology. In other words, knowledge is infinitely expanding and by being knowable it must be capable of being shared with others. Knowledge is a public domain.

This stance of science effectively negates both the proposition that there are elements of the universe forever outside of human understanding and that truth is only a private enterprise, essentially denying both a supernatural aspect of reality and moral subjectivism. Here we return to where we began, with the difficulties of the so-called new age movement and at times that which is found in New Thought or Unitarianism circles. I want to quickly note that this is not identical with the movements in question, only a presence some give air-space to in the attempt at being inclusive for the sake of inclusivity. In the search for enlightenment it is fairly easy to rush head-long into the farcical simply because of the emotional weight given to an increase in profundity being synonymous with a greater truth. Deepak Chopra is quite rightly famous for this, for however good some of his points very well may be, there is a tendency to display greater degrees of confusing language in an attempt at sounding wise with the result being anything but. While certainly there is a level of truth that is identified with the acceptance of it by each person, this is not the whole of nature of truth and science-general reminds us that just as we share our existence with each other, just as we realize who we are individually through the necessity of creating relationships so truth is not wholly residing within an individual, any individual and claims regarding existence must all be brought into the light of discourse and critique.

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Connected thoughts to this can be found in this entry.

The Darkness Within Light

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:06:00 +0000

Ever stare at a candle-flame, focus on the wavering and flickering quality of its nature? There comes a point when the flame is all you see, everything around you fades away into darkness and there’s a feeling of centeredness in which the attachment or association your thoughts have with the so-called external reality is reduced to a fraction of its normal energy-draining experience. There has been thrown around for decades ideas, often associated with the self-help movement and various forms of spirituality, in which positive thinking or positive appraisal gets thrust front and center in what is at times declared a war against negativity and the feeling of smallness or disempowerment. Often connected with the fight against cancer in which negativity lets the cancer win and even more simplistically with attracting monetary wealth, positive thinking has a long history of running up against the difficulties of life and positing that a smile and a chuckle will do what a dedication to work often won’t.

I am not removing the power of looking at life through the lens of a more positive framing, our experiences are shaped and the particulars of them focused on through the emotional lens applied. How many of us, having decided to force a smile and view things from a different perspective, find our anger and negativity waning and opportunities that were unseen suddenly becoming noticed? There is not so much a creation going on here as the opportunities were always there in potential, but until our minds changed to hold a space for them, they might as well have been non-existent. This sense of positive thinking is essentially the positive side of it, but like all good ideas the attempt to frame the whole of existence through only one lens gets us into trouble. What ends up happening in this myopic view is not so much a renewal of positive thinking but the erasure of all other kind of thought, all for the purpose of ensuring the continued forward-moving power of positivity. The exclusion of all else ignores the multiplicity of which life can and should be viewed. Anymore than a continued focus on depression and negativity and worthlessness closes a person off to the very real facets of life that are important, beautiful and ecstatic so a simplistic willful focus only on positivity can blind one to very real difficulties that are nipping at our heels and sometimes beating on our back. This is, what Ken Wilber notes, a refusal to see life as a system of interlocking nests within nests or contexts within contexts all the way down, in which one method of inquiry within one context is broadened to all, losing nuance and the acknowledgment of a differentiated reality.

So why the candle example? A flame is beautiful, giving light, giving warmth, associated with the crackling flames of a roaring fire and the tenderness of a romantic dinner. If focused on too long however, everything else disappears and becomes ignored eventually leading even this singular vision to delve an absence. A flame does not exist without fuel, without a context through and by which it exists and has being. To focus solely on the flame is to ignore the multi-faceted reality which gives it form and forget the thought and intent which brought it into existence. The flame that began as warmth and object of focus becomes a consuming and destructive fire. I remember learning to drive and getting my first car, a rather horrible vehicle that signified so much of the journey through adolescence. If I were to focus only on the vehicle itself I’d lose the context of its associated goodness, the laughter among friends, transporting nine people at a time all piled in, and the freedom of travel. If I focused solely on the associated good times I’d lose track of the terrible gas mileage and the way the brakes seized up and almost ran me off the road. There is no singular view that encapsulates the totality of the experience owning that vehicle and I do my life a disservice by focusing on one to the exclusion of the others. Good and bad here are less important, if even possible to be objectively determined, than the meaning and lessons learned from noting the whole of that time.

I want to posit a slightly different framing here, that sometimes the “dark” is actually truth under a false light. The desire within positive thinking is, I believe, reactionary, an offering to counter the supposed negative or mechanistic soul-denying view of a purely scientific/technological reality. While there is legitimacy in this framing of the scientific view of reality, it is itself a reactionary position against the ideological context that science grew out of. In a time where truth was dictated by religious fiat and those who questioned the divine nature of these declarations were killed, it is little wonder that science began and was fueled by an abject denial of the spiritual and sought to boil everything down to a flatland of mechanisms, or as Wilber says, “its.” This is not the world of science today however, as specialists recognize the interconnection of various disciplines and there is a willingness not blindly to accept the mystical but to account it a space of meaning. Science has always been constrained and found freedom within the principle of contextual-criticism, where one’s ideas are noted for their particular placement in the sea of understanding and critically analyzed for their ability to account for the information available to a greater or lesser degree than so far offered by others. Indeed, it is here in this “darkness” of critical uncertainty that truth is so often sought and found. Light being light is already illuminated and serves not to broaden our vision but to showcase where we have yet to look.

As a flame flickers we can notice the illumination even as we note the presence of a dark inner aspect of its existence. The exclusion of all else, such as is found in an over-reliance on intuition or the emotionally monumental quality of phenomenological experience, make the flames become only absence and therefore leads to the loss of the whole. Our perspective does indeed help shape our world but it is not the only act in town as even that perspective is given shape and nuance via variables of which we have no control over. We can and should burn with the fervor of constantly seeking truth, the universe is a life-giving spectrum of possibility becoming actuality, though a responsible traveler will do so with an eye towards the dark of an uncertainty asking for light.
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Physical copies of "Journeys of a Spiritual Atheist" are now available through CreateSpace.
https://www.createspace.com/4144076

A Hierarchy Of Separation

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:23:00 +0000

If you’ve been living under a rock lately there may have been missed the announcement that the Pope, yes the Holy Roman Pontiff, is resigning his post as the vicar of Christ on Earth. Pope Benedict leaves amidst a great many scandals, from the not nearly reported on enough problem of hiding pedophiles from prosecution to the barely reported at all information that he was a member of the Hitler Youth and also presided personally over the relocation of priests accused of molesting children. This is not, however, an expose on the ethical practices of either the pontiff or the Catholic Church. Greater investigative minds than I have spent the requisite time to unearth information pertaining to these and other problems, not least of which was Christopher Hitchens, and large tomes have been written on the history of the Church and its association with so many historical evils. I am not giving a pass here so much as dealing with an issue that I think more pertinent to my own writing, that being the hierarchical nature of spirituality, a systematized feudalism of spirit at the heart of Catholicism and for that matter so much of modern thinking. The resignation that has shook the world leaders into abject self-serving protestations of the Pope’s magnificence usually reserved for a funeral announcement has simply inspired these thoughts, however much a part of me wants to delve into a diatribe.

Before Martin Luther nailed his theses in a piece of carpentry heard round the known world, calling for reform and ushering in a period of incredibly self-serving governmental riding of ideological coat-tails as they thrust off the so-called tyranny of Roman rule, the notion of a hierarchy of spiritual placement was standard for most people. One simply lived their life knowing the means of salvation and talking to god residing within the religious office of priest, friar, monk, bishop and ultimately that of Pope. Resembling the political system of feudalism, this spiritual reality was not a foreign conceptualization to most being as it mirrored the experience of life on earth so therefore must be a reflection of a divine plan, a rather horrid example of Plato’s ideas.

The notion of going to someone else to talk to god, to receive forgiveness and a washing of sin strikes most of us, particularly Americans, as absurd to the point of silliness. We pride ourselves on our individuality and the abject worship of our own autonomous egos, believing in a democracy of social strata where hard work and determination can lift anyone by the power of gravity-defying bootstraps. Within these protests, however, lies a hidden (to those at the bottom of social class it is not so hidden) adherence to the idea of social placement as reflecting some inherent qualitative difference in a person. There is talk of “lifting your eyes to the prize” and “keeping your nose to the grindstone” as if recompense for trials and tribulations exist above one’s current station, allocating to those with more an automatic infusion of greatness those with less don’t have.

Lest it be assumed I am dismissing hard work and determination let me be clear that I am not. For all my belief in certain spiritual percepts I do not find legitimacy in mystical hocus-pocus where thought immediately brings form in some type of magical ritual. As even Ernest Holmes notes: “We should not separate life from living, Spirit from matter…” (Can We Talk to God?) There is a correspondence between action and effect however much action first resonated and was created in mind. Amusingly or not, it is precisely the conservative mind, spouting the rhetoric of Weber’s protestant work ethic, which seems to bring about this magical link between work and reward, leading one to the assumption that reward then must allude to an inherent quality of the person. What I am noting here is that while hard work and so on are aspects of a life being lived they do not inhere any particular quality to the person, they rather emerge from the existence of qualities already in place. So it is then there exists no derivation of extra internal substance to the person. Work and action do not bring about new qualities, they are instantiations of a growing awareness of those qualities one already possesses.

Notice the reversal of the structure here as hierarchy is turned on its head, with the divine singularity residing in us all and in an infinite universe of creative potential through growing conscious awareness we can instantiate this spark in ever-increasing possibilities of behavior. As well, there is now room for context, for those variables that are outside of individual control or conscious contemplation. Circumstance no longer shows us who we are in some form of reverse-identity but is the evolutionary soup within which we grow and have our being. As Holmes declared: “The greatest good that can come to us is the forming of an absolute certainty of ourselves and of our relationship to the Universe, forever removing the sense of heaven as being outside ourselves, the fear of hell or any future state of uncertainty.”

A hierarchy of spirituality is one of separation, of constant existential angst where one is pitted against the limitations of their own creation with circumstance giving meaning rather than the one giving meaning to experience. In this separation is all manner of psychosis and a focus on lack. Here is found the feudalism of spirituality in Catholicism, where another by virtue of holding a particular office is somehow possessed of a greater degree of divine form. If the construct of god as all is used, then divinity as singularity does not inhere within one form more than another, it simply is all.

When one owns the spiritual ground of their incarnation there is an acknowledgment of interconnection such that real power over effect is grasped, similar to when one learns a new skill or is enlightened to a new idea, that light being one of awakening from slumber. Our potential action is not infinite in the sense of being free from context, but it is only individually bound by our ignorance to a greater good. Imagination is the stuff of creation and it is supplied by a constant infusion of one’s recognition of spiritual union with all.

Being Completed By Romance

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:01:00 +0000

In contemplating the nature of love and the many forms the word is associated with, I’m reminded of the movie Matrix: Revolutions in which Neo confronts a computer program who declares his ability to love another program who he calls his daughter. When asked by Neo how a program can love the gentleman and father notes the word has no inherent meaning, rather only referencing the felt connection that exists by virtue of declaring it so.

While the love noted by the movie character is that associated with the love of a father for his daughter, it is the “connection” piece that I want to focus on, primarily as it is associated with romantic love (other forms or love in general can wait for another entry). I think it can be noted without too much in the way of protest that if there were no people to express a romantic love, then such would not exist, at least in so far as we understand the term. It is, like all emotions and their physiological instantiation, something that at least at some level must take into consideration the referential point of the creature expressing it. This is not to indicate that love of all kinds is completely encapsulated by referencing only the person(s) expressing it, creating as it were some love-flatland, but without this reference there is a distinct loss in contemplating its nature. Therefore, to understand romantic love it is best to figure out what this connection is usually exemplified within.

Romantic love seems to come in two stages: the first and easiest is that associated with the intense and often immediate infatuation or interest between two (or more) people, its grand energy derived from the newness of the situation allowing the explosive projection of hopes, dreams and fantasies; the second stage is close to this as it is often felt during periods of intense emotional energy and the creation of some event, often a trip or special experience. The first stage in polyamorous circles is that often described as New Relationship Energy (NRE) and is the stuff of rueful amusement and joy, but also wariness because of its tendency to drive people towards bad decisions. The second stage is usually found in established relationship connections both positively in those special shared moments or negatively where the parties involved want to "rekindle the fire" or in some situations create an experience so as not to look at the bad lying around at their feet.

The connection, particularly in stage one, is almost entirely one of projected intent, where each person is hoping the other fulfills their poetically impressive desires to be “fulfilled” or “made whole.” The metaphorical language here is illuminating. When someone operates under the notion that they are trying to be “made whole” it infers the notion that they are not currently of one piece or are lacking in some vital aspect, leaving themselves not quite fully alive. The usage of fire as a metaphor for the passions can easily here be connected to the fires underlying creativity or creation and therefore of building a "new life together" (notably in romance novels where this seems the only legitimate form of love the author feels their readers need or want).

Quite often, however, the piece found does not in fact “complete” anything or even fit properly, except of course during the first stage of romantic love when, let's face, the frontal lobes have been dumped like a broken transmission in a car. That this is the stage where the intent is focused less on the other party involved and more on the projection of a need being met is no doubt why being “made whole” is so often replaced later on with “falling to pieces.”

Response: I agree with everything you say with one exception. Not all people enter romantic love with the intention of being made whole. I would say that, unless the one is fairly stable to begin with an entrance to any romantic love will only hinder stability as one person grows to depend more on another. In a more mature romantic relationship (where both parties feel basically complete and are looking for a partner to enjoy life and fulfill more long term goals with) I believe there is a great deal more longevity possible.

You may be right that in particular cases, romantic love is not considered in the context of being “made whole.” As with any generality there are always exceptions. However, I still think the general principle holds.

The reason I say this is due to the particular ways in which love in the romantic sense is typically discussed. Phrases such as being “completed” and “made whole” are more typical when romantic love is the context. It would be very peculiar for a father to express the love he has for his child as “completing” him or “making him whole.” I hazard to guess that such language is not used because the form of love a parent has for a child is like what one has for a subordinate. I don’t mean to belittle the experience, on the contrary, I don't consider any form of love to be more special than any other though certainly particular forms of it, like the one in question here, are prone to more poetic license and irrationality than others. What I'm expressing is the fact that a child is in no way capable of meeting the full needs of an adult and thus love is expressed more in terms of protection and concern.

True, if a person enters a relationship with a less than moderately stable mentality, what often occurs is a relational dependency. Now, I have spoken before about attachments and how dependency is an inevitable aspect of existence, though like before notice here that I am using the term dependence not slavery. It is the latter term where the person does not find fruition of self but abject subservience or sublimation of self to the other. Consider how the term is used in other contexts, like in the case of “he’s a hopeless romantic” or even in describing the historical period after the enlightenment as “romantic.” The similarity of these two examples is one of being beyond reason, delving almost into delusion, where it is assumed that reality simply doesn’t allow for certain thoughts to be actualized, thus being thought to be classified as “romantic.”

Now take this information and apply it back to the notion of romantic love as so far discussed. As I explained earlier, romantic love is typically used to describe the beginning of a relationship and later on into longer-term relationships though more about situations rather than a mode of being. Romantic love is what is typically meant when someone says that the couple has “kept the love alive.” (Forgive my mono-centered wording here as there are a vast number of variations in romantic entanglements which can involve more than two people.) There is usually a sense of euphoria and a significantly reduced sense of individuality when the thought is dwelled upon. Here then is the continuation of the notion of “being completed” and a sense of being absent a piece that has now been given, it is the very loss of individualness which drives the metaphoric principle in a form of the snake biting its own tail. Such notions are called romantic because, as was indicated above in it being beyond reason, at some level we know that it’s irrational. Incidentally, it's little wonder that we often use the phrase “crazy in love.” Love at this level is a little form of madness, not in the frothing at the mouth sense (though hey there's always whip-cream fun), but in the sense of lacking something and therefore placing us in the position of promoting ourselves as puzzles missing pieces.

I’m not saying that any of this makes romantic love wrong. On the contrary, it is not romantic love that is the problem but our worship of it as a society and the concomitant belief that there is an essential part of ourselves that is lacking, putting us always in a position of want rather than growth. There are many notions concerning our emotions packed with metaphorical entailments we are not aware of, romantic love is but one of them. When we take these ideas apart we are not doing so to get rid of them, romantic love in particular is a glorious and fun-filled adventure that I have experienced before and enjoy going through as it continues to happen.

To live a life of romance where "wholeness" is already experienced from each one of our existential places can keep us from later "falling to pieces." We are not trying to fill a lack but find new ways of expressing the human ability to love in many forms and in an ever-expanding way.

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The preceding is an exchange I had online discussing the nature of romantic love. The section in bold is a point made by the person I was engaging with. As is the nature of online discussions, initial written points are not always so polished and with that in mind I have gone through and redone my thoughts to reflect my current thinking and help with flow of information. I say this to be upfront and honest about the nature of this entry as I don't want to give a false impression as to either my writing or the conversation that occurred.

Self As Locus Of Interaction

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 19:51:00 +0000

In the previous entry I made much ado about the self and using it in the context of relationships as a means of being created from within and by those connections. I can only imagine that some may have been confused by this and from several conversations I’ve had in various community groups I realized perhaps it’d be a good idea to flesh this out a bit more. That a transcendent self, somehow disconnected from physical law and social variables (often religiously referred to as a soul though clearly soul need not be defined this way) is the basis for a context-free notion of free will and choice is only the largest consequence, providing a basis for the American system of justice/law and giving people the space to judge others with nary a reference to mitigating effects like upbringing, social influences and biology. There does seem to be an increasing sense in which this view of free will is inadequate and I look forward to the day when we as a society can look upon life-destructive behavior from a perspective of compassion rather than judgment. A step in that direction is to remove from the immediate lexicon of assumed ideas a notion of the monolithic singular self that interacts with circumstances.

One of my favorite thinkers who has had a major influence on the evolution of my ideas is Owen Flanagan, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University. All subsequent quotes are taken from his book The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them.

First let me point out my usage of the term “mind.” By mind is meant the interactive system of being derived from the complete biological systems of the body and the relationships those system have with all other entities, providing the means by which we relate to the world as one natural ontological entity to another. Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that notes the qualities or properties of what makes something what it is or its being-ness. We can speak of a universal substance and thus be discussing metaphysics generally, but when we get to particular instantiations and how to differentiate them and whether they exist at all we are then discussing ontology. A central difficulty in discussing the nature of mind/self (the hash noting already where I’m going with this) is our language system, given its subject-object form inherently providing a space for assuming a dissociation between the two. This is likely due to our biological need for differentiating what is our flesh from what is other flesh for purposes of procreation and eating. The reciprocal nature of our brains as it constantly interacts in a loop of input/output then gives us the feeling of having a self-knowledge of the mind. As Flanagan notes: “What we think of as our unique individual selves consist of the integrated set of traits we reliably express and embody, the dispositions of feeling, thought, and behavior we reliably display, as well as a certain kind of psychological continuity and connectedness that accrues to embodied beings by virtue of being-in-the-world over time.” Also, “The subjective feel is produced and realized in an organism by virtue of the relevant objective state of affairs obtaining in that organism.” In other words, the self exists not as a thing in itself, it has no separate ontology outside of the context from which it is derived, if you remove or change the extant variables you will remove or change the feel of which the self seems to possess all on its own. “What we call ‘the self’ is an abstract theoretical entity in the same way that force, mass, and energy are abstract theoretical entities.” We do not describe force outside of noting the interaction between two objects, no more than we describe mass except by the interaction between atoms and energy as the form it takes.

The problem here is one of inflation, of making more out of a feeling than what is actually there. To be self-aware is not a divorcing or dissociating concept but one that allows us to differentiate within experience what is our particular biological relation to everything else. “The self is an abstraction designed to do, in interpersonal and intrapersonal commerce, the work of explanation, prediction, and control.” The conceptualization of the self should be one of greater joining, in the sense that knowledge of how one is related can create a greater sense of being connected, even if such a feeling is initially felt within the seemingly necessary starting point of a separated self-awareness. We are not separated from anything else though as we all belong to an essential metaphysic, we all partake of and are created out of the same substance, the energy that manifests in form. While largely poetic, to say ‘we are the universe thinking of itself’ is not merely grandiose, though I admit it can certainly be used as such. Rather, it is a recognition that despite our differentiated ontology, we are of the same metaphysical substance that is no different than that which makes up the universe. As such, the action that arises out of the mind/self referred to as awareness is not just an individual enterprise but has cosmic connections.

Viewing the self as an abstract term given to the relational space created by the interaction between the brain and the universe allows us to see intentionality in a whole new light, one that is not about shame-filled judgment but a recognition of how we as the creatures we are interact in particular ways. It is an intentionality and an ethic derived from our particular ontology, not from a moral dictate separated and distant from the means by which we experience reality. All objects intend upon another in a broad sense of defining or giving structure to what the other is, each object not existing by itself but rather in relation to all else. For instance, to think of a rock only, disconnected from anything and everything else is impossible, for even in thinking of it within a dark expanse is to think of it in relation to that dark expanse. I have spoken of this in other entries when referring to the self as well, noting that to consider our individuality is to always do so from a place of relational dynamics, always in connection with something else. Here it simply points out that again we are not of a completely different nature then the universe and thus are not separate from the poetically-noted creative power of that universe. Consciousness or the awareness of self, as it relates to intentionality, is the ability to ‘see’ what is this intrinsic nature of all things, to imaginatively construct the relations of one to another. This imagination stems often from within the felt experience of an “I” participating from a place of declarative power, in no small way reminiscent of the Jewish and Christian myth of Adam and Eve naming the animals in the Garden. As Flanagan puts it: “What was this ‘I’ that is having the thought? ‘I’ is how we denote the biological and psychological continuity of our unique first-person stream of consciousness.” It is a linguistic notation of the centrality of the subject doing the action, not an expression inflated to a separate being.

“The self that is the center of narrative gravity is constructed not only out of real-life materials; it is also organized around a set of aims, ideals, and aspirations of the self.” There is no relevant loss to ethics, meaning or purpose in removing the notion of a monolithic separated self. All these still exist and perhaps even more strongly as they are now acknowledged as being bound within interactional and inter-relational reality, providing us with a clear image that we are not lonely creatures striving blindly into a cold dark night, but alive and existing in a fullness the awareness of which is a constant path of further enlightenment. To wax poetic for another moment, “I and the Father are one” is not then simply a mystic declaration of Jesus but one which we can all make, partaking as we do from our own locus of experience we call self and yet always within the reality of a single non-separated universe.

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“Journeys Of A Spiritual Atheist” is a collection of entries from 2012 categorized and organized to help with integrating the flow of information. It is available on Kindle and Nook.

Relationships: The Expression of the Self

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 17:54:00 +0000

Recently I was asked by my amused and curious girlfriend just what my strategy is in pursuing other relationships (yes we’re poly, as I’ve noted before so this is a perfectly reasonable and wonderful question to ask within the space of open communication) considering that I don’t seem to do the same thing beyond one person. Coming as this question did upon the heels of conversations I’ve recently had in online groups concerning the nature of social bonding and the feeling of loneliness or lack that can sometimes occur in seeing other people who’s lives seem so much more special than ours, I now find myself returning to a theme of entries I’d left behind a while ago entitled “relationships.” As seems often the case I likely will be presenting something slightly different than the usual understanding but I do have my own projected reputation to uphold of being a dissenter possessed of an increasingly healthy ego.

Polyamorous circles or not, relationships are almost all anyone often talks about, with ridiculous amounts of books being written on the subject and research constantly being conducted as to the how of their working, the why of their existence and how to deal with the numerous difficulties that arise within them. This frankly is not an odd thing considering the central means of relating to the world is from the locus of an internalized ‘I.’ Try for a moment to think of or interact with anything or anyone without keeping in mind one’s interconnection with it. Don’t try too hard though as it is when we cease noticing our surroundings and therefore our connection with other objects that we start harming ourselves, either by stubbing one’s toe by running into something we didn’t see or having hurt feelings because we weren’t keeping aware of how another was relating to us. Noting this raises my point, that relationships, and by that term I mean any and all interactive connections, are the means by which we express our selves or the various ‘I’s’ that provide the focus of all our narratives.

I am aware and have written about this several times in the past, though undoubtedly will continue to do so again and again in the future, that the self as commonly understood is of quite a different nature than what I am discussing here. In a New York magazine article on The Self in Self-Help, it is noted that the common definition of the self in self-help literature is: “Somewhere below or above or beyond the part of you that is struggling with weight loss or procrastination or whatever your particular problem might be, there is another part of you that is immune to that problem and capable of solving it for the rest of you. In other words, this master theory is fundamentally dualist. It posits, at a minimum, two selves: one that needs a kick in the ass and one that is capable of kicking.” With this in mind it is easy to consider relationships, especially when difficulties in them arise, as instantiations of behavior stemming out of the false self in need of correction from the intuitive genius found in our other self. This is most easily seen whenever someone declares “I’m better than that” or “I don’t know what came over me” or “deep down I knew it was wrong.” Other examples abound and I won’t annoy the reader by attempting to note all of them. However, there is no such thing as this other self, this fount of wisdom just waiting like a blind yogi to expel pithy sayings in a breath of holy power. What this thinking seems to carry over from, though with less nuance, is Freud’s notion of the Id, Ego and Superego, with the Id being the self in need of a good kick in the pants and the Superego residing as the pontifical yogi.

While there is some truth to Freud’s notion it is not important to go into here, I merely point it out as a means of reference and noting how even great ideas (though I’m aware not everyone considers Freud’s notions as great) are used in an often simplified form leading to problems in relating to the world. I have written before how the monolithic transcendent self is an illusion and I plan to write more about it in an upcoming entry using Owen Flannagan as a primary source. However, related to that I want here to deal with the false notion of dualism in the sense of the two-self model found in self-help. Rather than two I want us to ponder the idea that there are in fact multitudes of selves, all with their own narratives, all with their own way of interacting with the world and providing a perspective through which experience is generated as a phenomenological feeling. We speak of it colloquially in our American culture as “putting on a different hat” when discussing work or being a parent or hanging out with friends (though curiously the latter is often depicted as being the most authentic, more on that later). What is often meant though is that the central ‘I’ chooses various aspects of itself for dealing with different circumstances and I want us to do away with that entirely, or at least as much as we’re able. Instead of “hats” I want to posit the idea that we put on entirely different “heads” and none of them contradict any of the others though the behavior that may result from these different selves certainly often appears to, hence the previous notation of people declaring they “weren’t themselves” when they acted poorly or not in line with what they now feel to be their true self. Looked at this way, the self becomes less about possessing a centralized clearing house to organize potential behavior and more about relating to an ever-changing world. From this perspective we no longer should look upon ourselves with disassociating shame when having committed a wrong act but with an understanding that like everything our selves are context-bound manifestations of relationships. While this makes us more responsible for our behavior in the sense that we can no longer call it “other,” it also should help us reconcile the flights of angst and condemnation when we do not do what we would like to do. Reality is we always do what we would like to do, it’s just that there are many sources for the creation of those wants.

None of this absolves us of the desire to strive towards consistency, in fact it frees us to pursue it from a better ground. Rather than fighting in a soul-searing tumultuous internal battlefield we can see our relationships as manifesting various selves and through the means of guiding awareness, focus on those relationships that bring about the self which contributes the most towards well-being and joy and the expression of values held dear. In discussing the creation of romantic relationships, an article from the National Institute of Health (NIH) discusses the role of various neurotransmitters in facilitating relationship bonding, noting that “Oxytocin does more than make us feel good. It lowers the levels of stress hormones in the body, reducing blood pressure, improving mood, increasing tolerance for pain and perhaps even speeding how fast wounds heal. It also seems to play an important role in our relationships. It’s been linked, for example, to how much we trust others.” This is more than just a reflection on romantic relationships but the bonding associated with any and all relational attachments with other people, from those able to of holding a space for the most casual of touch to the wildest of passionate intimacies. This is likely, as noted above, why we often think of time with our friends as being the most authentic, because we are busy interacting in a way that involves more touch and personalized bonding. Our bodies and the minds which are instantiated by and through them have an innate predilection and desire to form relationships, not just because we live in an interactive world though we do but as it is the source by which the universe finds intentional expression, meaning and purpose beyond (though still tied to) the merely mechanical. Who we are is not a lonely enterprise, it is a profoundly relational one.

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“Journeys Of A Spiritual Atheist” is a collection of entries from 2012 categorized and organized to help with the integrating the flow of information. It is available on Kindle and Nook.

Thoughts On Metaphysics and Social Implications

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:39:00 +0000

There are times when I get ahold of something and like a dog with a bone, need to bite down and shake it about until the juicy truth within is cracked open. So much of my studies have centered on not merely understanding reality but in a growing recognition of how relationship of any and all kinds is a fundamental quality of existence. With this in mind I found a series of points I’d created years ago and, with an eye towards filling it out with what I had learned since, came up with ten statements that grow on one another to describe what I take to be the human relation with reality. Food for thought perhaps, articulations of frustratingly confusing points possibly, but in the end I hope at least it inspires some reflection within each of us of just how it is we view ourselves and this crazy wonderful thing we call life.

The term “reality” is universal in application as it pertains to all things, concepts, etc. both known and unknown. As such, when using the term it is best to keep in mind during discussion what precisely is being referenced to determine precisely what aspect of reality is being considered. This concerns in particular Ken Wilber’s notion of nested reality, noting that everything is context within context all the way down.
Language as it concerns existential reference instantiated in words, reference or point to something specific. Whether what is being referenced is simply a particular mental status of someone and as such has no more context or truth-claim than that, or is part of another nest within broader reality is why reference is so important to be delineated, since what one references will determine what aspects of reality is being considered.
Perspective is the conceptual formation of the particular frame of reference other aspects of reality are then subjectively known or understood. It is not of a dissimilar metaphysic since all is of one reality, rather it is the specific way in which the entity relates to reality universal. The very idea of perspective is only possible if there exists more than the subject, otherwise everything would be merely extensions of the individual and not be capable of existence as things or objects in themselves nor understood by any other person in a different manner.
Subjectivity is not a creative enterprise, but an interpretive one. One does not create a new reality, since all belongs to a singularity, but rather one relates to it differently based on the interpretive devices utilized. These devices, from sense experience to critical rationality, subjection to authority, etc. are not perfect and can be error-prone though the particular error may belong only to a specific aspect of the interpretation, not the entirety. This non-absolute nature of knowledge in no way makes impossible the acquisition of truth in so far as truth is acceptable, as it seems it is required to be, as one of increasing certainty or probabilistic knowledge.
The interpretive dimension of experience is and only can be known when brought into public discourse via description, i.e. the usage of language. Until this is done, interpretation is merely an imaginative construct, still a part of reality universal but not something that has been demonstrated as being accurate or inaccurate in its depiction of it, hence the need as noted previously of noting whether said opinion is referencing merely a cognitive state or has repercussions beyond the subjective experience.
The relation a person has to reality can be mistaken as being that of a cause-effect relationship or of a separate disposition in so far as the reality one relates to is seen as somehow fundamentally different than the one relating. This tendency in thought is unavoidable given two issues: one, the nature of perception which requires a biological separation of subject and object to maintain a relational narrative and two, the nature of language as it exists in the form of subject/object/predicate. This gives rise to the phenomenological “I” that western philosophy is obsessed with and is found socially to be instantiated in ego-based individuality and the attachment to things.
This obsession with separateness and individuality has created a social paradigm surrounding subjectivity that is without warrant, centrally that it is not beholden to any truth standards beyond the mere articulation of one’s point of view. There is no such thing as an “I’ other than as a reference to a particular contextual instantiation of reality. Social practicality may make this impossible to put into every-day practice, at least not without a complete overhaul of our social systems (especially that of the criminological), but that is not to ignore that in discussion of consciousness and related topics, it should be kept in mind in order to maintain an acknowledged relationship with more than mere ego.
Hence, given the fact that existence exists and that subjectivity is only the interpretation of that reality, not a creative enterprise (at least as previously defined), interpretation is capable of being critically analyzed as either correct or incorrect based as it is in a declaration of what the shared reality is. That the interpretation is felt to be correct by the interpreter is a non-issue, nobody believes something of which they are not convinced or accept to some degree. However, as there are many particular physical manifestations and nests of reality, each one capable of being known in increasing probability, so any particular interpretations can be noted as either more or less accurate than others.
While it is true that “society” is largely responsible for the definition of words and thus could fall prey to the frustration of a majority rule, this is more a warning to be careful of defining and articulating what is being referenced in any conversation of which the result has multiple ramifications. It is a warning against stopping the continuation of rational discourse, not against the seeming arbitrariness of verbal construction. Care taken in determining the particular reference allows for an identification of just what field or nest of reality is under discussion. A problem arises when a single definition or usage is indicated as enveloping all possible contexts, flattening reality to only one plane.
The multi-contextual nature of reality requires a multi-perspectival means of relating to it, a power we have in abundance as indicated by the many variations in meaning we may ascribe to any single experience. Recognizing this is not to fall into subjectivism as that would make every manifestation of reality a single flatted plane all on its own, but to take the time to determine and appreciate the web that is of us, in us, and has made us conscious of it.

There is is so much more than these ten points, delving as it could into morality, just what relationships are and so on, of which I will no doubt continue to articulate and share. I hope these thoughts are not considered binding but a starting point brought out of the joy found in continually exploring. Life is not stagnant and neither should we be in living it or knowing it.

Memory Creation and Psychopathy

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:40:00 +0000

In The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain by James Blair, Derek Mitchell and Karina Blair, when describing possible environmental contributions to the development of psychopathy, the authors noted that while damage to the hippocampus due to the release of too much cortisol from stressful events will result in a degraded ability to regulate the release of stress hormones, they did not think this would contribute to psychopathy as the hippocampus has been indicated to being involved with memory and spatial reasoning “It is unclear why impairment in either memory or spatial processing would cause psychopathy” (p. 35-36).

This statement sparked some thoughts derived from other literature I’ve read, with the result being a curiosity as to whether I am now embarking on a wild-goose chase of disparate connections or my pondering is actually leading to something legitimate. Time will tell and undoubtedly I’ll have to do some more research as to whether people with far more experience than I have covered this. Until then, here are some thoughts and perhaps it’ll spark some return reflections from others.

My initial inquiry centers on memory and I recall the book by Gerald Edelman entitled A Universe of Consciousness. While the point of the book is to establish within an embodied neurology a theory of consciousness, both what it is and how it developed, Edelman spends significant time on the nature of memory and its relation to human interaction with the environment. Edelman first articulates the notion of reentry as being central to his view of human neurology, describing it as “the ongoing, recursive interchange of parallel signals between reciprocally connected areas of the brain, an interchange in space and time.” Essentially this boils down to being like a teeter-totter of neurochemistry, with the action of one side having a result upon the other and vice versa, though when it comes to the brain there is no such thing as a single connection but thousands. A result of reentry is synchrony between functionally specialized areas of the brain. “This synchronous firing of widely dispersed neurons that are connected by reentry is the basis for the integration of perceptual and motor processes” (pg. 48). This integration is the fundamental building block of human behavior. Through the emergence of the thalamocortico complex, the reciprocal connectivity between the thalamus and the cerebral cortex, perceptual categorization in the posterior brain was able to be linked with value-based memory of the anterior areas of the brain, providing the mechanism for the creation of a “remembered present” whereby previous experiences could be linked with current or imagined contingencies.

Rather than viewing memory as a snapshot of an event, Edelman posits that “a memory is not a representation; it is a reflection of how the brain has changed its dynamics in a way that allows the repetition of a performance” (pg. 95). “These changes are reflected in the ability to repeat a mental or physical act after some time despite a changing context, for example, in ‘recalling’ an image.” There is some linkage here that could be made to Dawkins’s and Blackburn’s notion concerning the meme. The sometimes parasitical nature of memes and memeplexes, when looked at from a neural point of view indicates a connection with certain behavioral patterns that are not beneficial for the host’s reproductive well-being but seem incapable of being stopped. Memory, according to Edelman, is not a separate function of the brain, but a result of numerous interconnected pathways. This interconnectivity results in “a key property of memory in the brain: that it is, in some sense, a form of constructive re-categorization during ongoing experience, rather than a precise replication of a previous sequence of events” (p. 95). Memory is like the continual creation of an expanding symphony rather than a discrete set of experiences being added one to the other. The “extrinsic signals convey information not so much in themselves, but by virtue of how they modulate the intrinsic signals exchanged within a previously experienced neural system.” In other words, an external stimulus acts not by adding large amounts of new information, but “by amplifying the intrinsic information resulting from neural connections selected and stabilized by memory through previous encounters with the environment” (pg. 137). Memory is like a painting then, with established colors being done over and over again, adding layer upon layer, when various colors are inspired by present events, leading some to be heavier or darker than others despite having all been originally created at the same time or out of the same experience.

Related to memory is the creation of an internal biological-reference or self. Owen Flanagan, in The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them, describes the self, most often referred to as “I” in personal narrative, as primarily indexical. “’I’ is how we denote the biological and psychological continuity of our unique first-person stream of consciousness” (p. 224). The “I” seems to be a result of the primary consciousness associated with Edelman’s construction of memory and the individual’s ability to create a remembered present, a connection between past experience and current or imagined context via the reconstructive properties of memory. “The fact that ‘I’ uttered today seems just like uttering the word yesterday is, first, because the conscious stream is sensibly and subjectively continuous and, second, because in the normal course of things we change very little from day to day” (p. 226).

If the role of the hippocampus is to consolidate short-term memory into long-term memory in the cerebral cortex, and an impairment in its function results in a loss of control for regulating stress hormones, then there exists a possibility that this breakdown could also lead to a difficulty in normal responses to stressors and a consequent difficulty in integrating stressful events into the continuing creation of a self-narrative. An inability to integrate events will result in undifferentiated anxieties that need to be treated by behavior, leading to a potential increase in instrumental or goal-directed behavior, the particular manifestation of which will be determined by social context. For example, stealing $50 is pointless for someone with millions but significant for someone with five cents.

Blair et al. note that “individuals with psychopathy show reduced responding to threatening stimuli.” These individuals also show “reduced emotional responses when imagining threatening events and reduced augmentation of the startle reflex” (The Psychopath, p. 50). This reduction in integrating stressors and events could be indicative of hippocampus degeneration leading to a difficulty in learning from these events and any changes to the self-narrative that usually result. In fact, it is later noted by Blair et al., individuals with psychopathy “present with particular difficulty for instrumental learning tasks that require the formation of stimulus-punishment associations.” Negative responses to behavior, which normally result in a changing of behavior for people, the psychopath seems incapable of processing. This lack of response seems due to a lack of empathy, which at core is simply the ability to associate the external stimuli of others with similar internal stimuli and thus experience a mirrored response. As Oatley, Keltner and Jenkins in the textbook Understanding Emotions note, “emotions guide action in a world that is always imperfectly known, and can never be fully controlled. It is not so much that emotions are irrational, rather that when we have no fully rational solution because we do not know enough, they offer bridges toward rationality” (p.261). Without these bridges, the psychopath is limited in his/her integrative ability and thus with connecting with others and assimilating new experiences.

The conclusion of all this is not that Blair et al. are necessarily wrong with their supposition of the hippocampus lacking a role in psychopathy development, rather I’m just noting that there should be more research into self-narrative development and the role the hippocampus may have in the reciprocal processing pathways that are at its core. The result may be a better understanding of not only the underlying mechanisms that guide emotional development but also why certain memes are so readily accepted by the brain of the psychopath. Perhaps, with these new insights, a workable therapy could be developed that focuses not on fixing emotional integration itself but on restructuring the self-narratives that provide the means for doing so leading to an increased focus on attachment.

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“Journeys Of A Spiritual Atheist” is a collection of entries from 2012 categorized and organized to help with the integrating the flow of information. It is available on Kindle and Nook and will soon be available as a paperback.

Expression Is Not Always About Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:10:00 +0000

In a psychology textbook from college there is a picture of teenagers all dressed in various states of goth or other styles of dark clothing, the caption under it declaring this to be a form of social mimicry and conformism. I certainly had a good laugh then and I’d be lying if I said it still didn’t bring a smile to my face. I can guarantee that were you or I to ask any of those teens they’d swear up and down that they were solid individuals completely against the “system” of social conformity and just expressing the way they were free to do so. Or at least something of that sort, as I’m likely giving many of them more philosophical credit than due. From our fashion to even much of the thoughts we have, these are simply regurgitated social memes taken in by other influences, media and relational connections, funneled through one of our own particular narratives but largely flowing into manifestation with little input from the all-powerful ego we so amusingly think we possess. “I just want to be me,” could be the siren call of modern America, the underlying selfish declaration beneath so much of conservative and liberal religious ideology alike, and the rallying cry for every fad and Oprah-inspired unscientific diet craze. We’re so busy wanting to just be us, wanting to be original or an individual that we lose sight of the anxiety of being unnoticed that undergirds all of this and in the process become even less individualistic than we started as.
I wrote in “Freedom From, Not Freedom To Do,” about how the mere ability to do something does not equate to real freedom when it does not come from a place of a life-giving and community-acknowledging frame of reference. Without this soul-deep understanding of an interrelated and interactive reality where no one person exists as an island no matter their magnificence, we become but disassociated flotsam floating in a sea of possibility and without any purpose. So it is here, expanded, that in the expression of what we call our “self” we often are so charged with doing something that we do no more than continue in bondage to old ideas given a shiny new polish. I’m thinking now of the man or woman embarking on their third marriage, having even declared at one point that marriage wasn’t important. I’m thinking of the woman or man who puts on the face of joy so that they never see the bodies of relationships they leave behind them, creating stories like an awful caricature of “Life of Pi,” desperate to never see the darkness that is a part of them. I’m thinking of the man or woman latching onto every new diet fad, every new fantastical spiritual craze, mentally screaming themselves hoarse in an attempt to leave behind old ideas of worthlessness and angst even as they cling desperately to those very stories in the chill of the night. In expressing ourselves there is no inherent or necessary joy to be found if such occurs while we are running away with chains dragging behind us.
As I’ve written before, I identify as both an atheist and as polyamorous, a social combination that has me looking at times like a blood-spattered biker entering a nunnery. And no not like the nunnery from Monty Python’s “The Holy Grail,” that would just be awesome (if you’re not sure the reference please watch the movie and laugh). Within these two groups there is found a great deal of people who are loudly “just expressing” themselves. Now, before I go further let me unequivocally note that the mere existence of what society considers outrageous behavior does not in any way necessitate that said person is doing so from a place of pain and escapism, ignoring their real issues. The 9-5 monotony of corporate work, the swallowing of one’s pride, being poorly compensated for work while management basks in ridiculously huge dividends, all of this and more that characterizes “society” is an insanity on par with thinking of oneself as being an egg and has little to no basis for calling out anyone else for being escapist and ignoring their problems. That said, the similarity we all share by virtue of belonging to the hilarity that is humanity, is a profound ability to seek healing through expression while ignoring the why of our behavior. Not every curious behavior can stem from this, but the reality of it is far too widespread not to make some general remarks. I have met far too many people shilling atheism, as I originally did, from a place of child-like wailing or engage in polyamory because they’re simply playing the field in search of a new monogamy but want to make it sound as if it’s more special than that. It is not, however the tone of this writing so far may indicate, from a place of frustration (or not entirely) that I am speaking but from a place of empathic pain, of shared discomfort and a fierce desire to have others reeling from real healing from within a space real peace.
In a recent conversation with a truly wonderful friend of mine it was brought up that there’s a difficulty in being truthful and wanting to engage in open/honest communication, but also wanting to spare someone the pain of hurt feelings or simply coming across like an uncaring person. We all know the person who declares themselves “too honest,” when the reality is they just like spouting off their opinion no matter the emotional repercussions. The result of this conversation was an emergent principle, or at least one now better articulated, stating that sharing one’s thoughts must first come from a place of acknowledging the space created between the two (or more) people and from within that space know what the boundaries are for expression. At no point does this allow for lying (I agree with Harris that lying is never a good idea, a point I’ll address soon in another entry) and if a question is asked that one may feel uncomfortable addressing fully, the responsibility rests upon the person asking to say how much of or whether they are ready for a full answer. Turning this principle around a bit we come to an answer concerning the current difficulty with expression as escapism rather than expression as freedom. In the manifestation of new behavior let us first ask ourselves what space we are operating out of, both in relation to our internalized stories and with those of whom we are about to share. If the space still holds spots of darkness then let us first begin by addressing them, embracing them, and politely asking them to be gone as they are no longer needed. When the space exists in which those stories no longer have as much power then begin questioning how much the particular behavior is important to do. Often it may not be all that significant anymore and interest may be drawn towards something that is far more life-giving. If it’s still significant, well then by all means, get your groove on and be proud, knowing your expression is from a place of grace and a desire to spread joy.
This process is not an easy one and certainly is not one that I find myself always following through on. I get depressed and will eat an entire pizza rather than addressing the nature of the depression, an expression of myself that brings definite momentary delight but no long-term solution. We all I am quite certain can come up with such small though poignant examples. Life is not always about doing something exactly all the time, but about an upward spiraling of awakening, building upon practice and knowing our dance is beautiful.

Answers To A Question: No, Yes, Maybe

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:26:00 +0000

My last entry, "The God That Is There and Nowhere," concerned the difficulty associated with defining god and how atheists in particular, though everyone else does as well, fall victim to accepting the assumption that god is or should be defined by fundamentalism and so-called traditional religions. I pointed out that “God” has no distinct reference point in itself, however much Platinga would have us believe otherwise (for a critique of his type of thinking, albeit completely irreverent, see here). In other words, while “God” has many and sundry potential definitions there is nothing to which it applies as distinctly itself, existing as it does as a mere self-referential data point connecting only to an individual’s cognitive state. This is much like the case for love, existing as it does in many many forms for various people within a multitude of cultures, though happily and with some fascination we can isolate the neuro-chemicals associated with those associated mental states.

Given this state of affairs, there is simply no reason to placidly accept for yourself what another claims, instead offering to engage in a dialogue and parsing out for the purpose of creating your own meaning what such a powerfully emotive term will mean for you. Notice I didn’t say anything about truth here since as “God” has no reference we’re merely talking about meaning and meaning is almost completely context-bound. Once someone’s personal meaning is expressed as relating to various claims about experience (beyond the phenomenological) and the universe, then it becomes about truth and is therefore open to criticism. Here then is where a more thorough understanding of atheism comes into play.

Growing up as I did in fundamentalist conservative Christianity, I began studying apologetics at the rather amusing age of 15, amusing because my brain was undoubtedly going haywire with hormones and my energy was spent on determining the efficacy of my religious faith rather than pursuing women though considering my often abject failure at the latter during that time perhaps it’s not so amusing. Within the bounds of C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, Gordon Clark and others I was often presented with the notion that atheism was an affirmation stating effectively “the belief that there is no god.” I won’t go into the history of this brand of atheism as frankly the point of describing atheism this way had little to do with history and everything to do with keeping the onus for truth claims on the back of the un-believer, leaving the believer safely ensconced on the defensive, a place as any general would say is often the easiest way to fight. I find that most people tend to view atheism this way as well, which means the apologist has succeeded in defining within society what an entire group of people declare without actually consulting them.

Later on in my studies I came around a book by George H. Smith called The Case Against God. In it, Smith articulated what is known as the negative or disconfirming definition of atheism, effectively stated as “the absence of a belief in a deity.” In other words, if one were to string out a person’s beliefs in a long line there’d be a hole or absence when coming to the subject of god or deity. Suffice to say this was the straw that broke the back of my by-then-difficult adherence to supernatural theism as now the question of affirming claims about reality rested where it should have rested all along, on the backs of the apologist, who by claiming the existence of a supernatural being and consequent means of epistemic acquisition found in revelation and faith, was making profound statements concerning the nature of reality and experience, all of which could be tested. As a side-note I reflect often on the humorous state of religious apologetics when finding arguments against evidentialist (McDowell and Geisler and Lewis) apologetics I had only to go to the presuppositionalists (Schaeffer and Clark) and vice versa. Christianity certainly does a fine job of destroying its own claims all by its lonesome.

Why does any of this matter however? The affirmation or non-affirming stance of someone are powerful answers to various questions, not least of which to that of the existence of a deity. It is ridiculously easy when presented with an opinion, however heavily laden it is by information and research, to pontificate from a space of ego-strength how one views said opinion, when the more authentic and honest response would be to declare “I don’t have an opinion” or if this is too burdensome, declare “I have some thoughts but I need to study more to give a truly worthwhile response.”

This is, incidentally and keeping in line with the theme of atheism for this entry, why I no longer adhere to either position of atheism strictly, as both address various aspects of the theistic question and serve up a more nuanced view of human experience. On one hand it is perfectly acceptable to declare affirmatively that “there is no god” as long as one has in mind a particular deity. Frankly all mono-theists are atheists in this sense when it relates to the Greek and Roman pantheon and to Hindu gods. What this position holds is the acknowledgment that what one is being presented with is a particular claim and, through an understanding hopefully garnered by dialogue, can then declare a yes or no to its claim and back up said position with reason and evidence. The negative stance, or “lack of belief,” offers up a foundation of skeptical inquiry where statements concerning reality are to be reflectively considered rather than mindlessly accepted or dismissed. Given the ubiquity of people’s notions concerning deity, an absence of belief here is not without some serious weight and helps clarify that when one declares the existence of an entity of extraordinary aspect, it is often best to withhold judgment until the claim is better articulated beyond the mere statement of said belief.

All this is considered when I declare my continued identification with atheism. Those claims within traditional theism, even those that are more carefully articulated have almost universally fallen short even within their own system, but also the concept of god has so many facets that to blankly deny all as if they're all of one form by virtue of using the same term is to not acknowledge the varied interrelated aspects of reality. Until a more carefully articulated form comes about, there’s an absence. So it is then with many other ideas we come across, from the mundane to the conspiratorial.

When faced with extraordinary or even contentious claims it is fully within anyone’s ability to bountifully declare their reaction, though as Mark Twain said “it is better to keep our mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” What we can do instead is ask for clarification, see where the claim has reference to aspects of reality and find research and the linguistic understanding to analyze those connections, then determine whether the particular claim is entirely invalid or perhaps where aspects of it may hold weight or wait for further clarification and hence hold an empty space. There are so many ideas we come into contact with and so much to fill one’s time with that this often consuming nuanced approach is entirely inappropriate but when it comes to notions that have so many repercussions for how we view ourselves, others and the universe at large, perhaps it’d be a good idea to spend more time figuring things out than reflexively responding.
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“Journeys Of A Spiritual Atheist” is available on Kindle and Nook. It is a collection of entries from 2012 organized into categories and put in an order to help facilitate an understanding of the flow of information.

The God That Is There And Nowhere

noreply@blogger.com (David Teachout) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 06:38:00 +0000

I want to explain what many may wonder at as I continue promoting the publication of my collected entries from last year using the term “atheist.” Getting involved in online discussions has brought yet again to my attention how poorly the concept of god is often utilized and how unfortunate it is that those of us of a different spiritual persuasion assume as legitimate what fundamentalists often end up screaming about in their hand-made signs and thunder about from their pulpits that too often serve as political platforms.

I made the mistake in my extended history with fundamentalism and search through apologetics and religious philosophy to assume I knew everything the other side had to offer, to paint them with all the casual brush strokes I'd be taught. When I de-converted it was in no small part due to realizing just how badly the other points of view were being characterized and asked myself: if this were truth, why is there a seeming pathological inability to understand competing points? In my years post-faith I delved into a more militant style of atheism and frankly found much the same ideological shortcomings, people so incensed at the frankly well-established errors in religious ideology that everything was thrown out and concepts weren't carefully parsed.

While there are those who are accurate, mostly, in pointing to the god of western philosophers as being a speculative form based upon monotheistic thinking, it is not accurate to say that it is precisely the same god being addressed, as even a rudimentary reading of Kant, Descartes and Spinoza will indicate. Merely basing one's speculation upon old or largely bad ideas in no way demands subsequent articulations to be dismissed, no more than much of the science we have today should be ignored simply because it came from false ideas that were tweaked and revamped. The brilliance of Thomas Kuhn was not in pointing out that science is completely subjective and relative (a misunderstanding far too many people have of his thinking) but that science, like any means of understanding the world, operates from the perspectival basis of human cognition and hence is open to recalibration through the careful enunciation of new paradigms. When we were children we thought there lived monsters under the bed, as adults we know this to not be true, and yet do any of us mock a child in his fears or do we hold them and attempt explaining later, all the while knowing that development is more than physical but mental as well?

I think it best to point out that the concept of god is not a singular thing, there are various truth claims or references in play. What is often conflated for atheists/humanists is the references or claims towards metaphysics, forgetting that there are also claims towards ethics and ways of relating to life as well, among others. While certainly most religious apologists wish us to combine them all making their job, at least in their own minds, easier, it is certainly not a requirement of us to fall for it or accept their premises. Besides which, are we really going to claim that religion has done absolutely nothing good in any way for any individual or humanity at large? Shall we ignore the cohesiveness it often brings or the sense of peace or feeling of transcendence that those calling themselves atheists or humanists or pagans or some other often achieve by connecting with nature? Noting the positives of an experience does not mean we must accept the entire framing of the situation or accept what one ideology claims about everything else.

When I refer to god I am not making any particular metaphysical claims, nor am I making any specific, as of yet, ethical claims. God here is not a person, however much our language tends to point that way, nor is god an active force with intent guiding reality, at least in any way that is contrary to the active causal forces that already guide and shape us. That god in this way could be identified as the totality of those physical forces simply indicates that we live in a causal universe, one that acts from the premise of cause/effect relationships or karma as the buddhist would call it.

Ken Wilber in his integral philosophy notes that there are varying nests of being, of contemplation, of analysis which require varying modes of truth testing and so on. For instance, no amount of neurology is going to make me understand fully the first-person phenomenology that another goes through, to do so completely would be to be that person and thus defeat the attempt. We instead use dialogue, questions, narrative framing and so on to build a means of ascertaining the truth of any declaration of felt feels. It's what talk therapy is mainly about and the efficacy of its findings is found in the millions of people who have found real peace through its proper utilization.

The god here is of a nest far afield, one that holds all others not in a necessarily causal fashion but as a cognitive device much like the field of geology holds together, like an umbrella, various sub-fields of research. There is no such thing as just studying geology, it can always be broken down to a specialization and with it will often use its own language or terms that are not helpful in a different specialization though assuredly they can be integrated.

There is no association or equivocation between god and physics or any other physical science, this is the god of contemplation and meditation, a heuristic device only. It offers a way of framing felt feels and a sense of the transcendence that, however much neurology we may discover is likely to never equate to the experience itself, no more than a full analysis of a hurricane will provide for us the experience of what it feels to be in one. Though clearly a growing understanding of neurology, physics, psychology, and so on can help us better articulate and frame our phenomenological experience such that we do not fall victim to the great many errors we as homo sapiens are prone to.

It is well and good to analyze and take apart the error-ridden claims of religious ideology, like any other other thinking, but we all must and should answer to reason and the careful articulation of the scientific enterprise. However, we portray ourselves as lacking in nuance and thus shortchange our ability to understand the fullness of the human situation when we think and accept as wholly accurate a simple common understanding of spiritual concepts rather than, as good creators of intention that we are, filling in ideas with what we'd like and using them accordingly.

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“Journeys Of A Spiritual Atheist” is now available on Kindle, Nook and paperback through Amazon. It is a collection of the entries from 2012 which have been categorized and organized to help with the flow of information and how it is presented. If you are so moved to purchase, please do me the extra favor of leaving a review. Thank you.