PSYCHOSCAPES

Defending what’s really real against the onslaught of AI

2025-10-29T09:42:00.004-04:00

What’s really real is Mother Nature, our bodies, and our sense of place

Defending what’s really real against the onslaught of AI

Capitalists have been riding roughshod over the natural world since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Now, Silicon Valley technocrats are plunging ahead to gain total dominance over humans by annexing our brains.

Already, high-tech wizards, using Madison Avenue flimflam, have conned us into offloading our memories onto our smartphones and relinquishing our sense of direction to Siri. But that’s only the beginning. The next step is for AI to take over our thinking, making us into machines.

Perhaps, if we really lived in a world where everything was relative –as some postmodernists claim – it would be okay to motor through life mindlessly like a machine. But we are not Chevys or Fords held together with mig-welds and epoxy, but living, breathing creatures intimately connected to our community and sense of place.

Not everything is relative!.

The best person I’ve found to refute that naive notion is Charlene Spretnak, considered "one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time.” In 1997, she wrote one of my favorite books, “The Resurgence of the Real.”^⁠1

Spretnak wrote this book to bring together research that clearly demonstrates humans are not separate, individual atoms drifting aimlessly around, free to alter our identity at will.

These studies demonstrated that our mind and our body, rather than being separate entities, function together as an integrated unit, dynamically interrelated with nature and other people.^⁠2 From that, she could confidently assert what is “really real:” the innate wisdom of our bodies, our sense of place, and Nature Herself.

Recently, to add fuel to the fire, a new book, “Against the Machine,” has hit the bestseller list. In it, novelist, poet, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth presents a terrifying account of how the technological-cultural matrix is enveloping all of us.

Kingsnorth is on the same page with Spretnak about what is really real. I applaud him for emphasizing that the modern world is suffering from a spiritual crisis, but he is being decidedly too specific by insisting that the only answer lies in adopting Orthodox Christianity.

In addition, his message is weakened from my point of view because he comes off as a reactionary radical railing against enemies like vaccines and trans people. Despite that, Bill McKibben, a leading environmentalist, concedes his basic thesis is correct: “that the world is in the grip of a force…that threatens to rip it asunder.”^⁠3

Like Spretnak, Kingsnorth places great importance on having a sense of place, complaining that too many environmentalists show “no sign of any real, felt attachment to any small part of that Earth.” In that regard, he is a man after my own heart, living simply in rural Ireland, planting trees, keeping animals, and cutting his grass with a scythe.

It appears both these authors may agree with my bottom line: there is no separation between our physical body and our mind, and no separation between us and Mother Nature. Essentially, we are all inseparably one organism.

I will close by relating a fantastic bit of deja vu that occurred after Darwin published his ground-breaking book, “The Origin of Species. It comes from an article in Orion Magazine by Maria Popova. She tells the story of a 27-year-old man, John Butler, who wrote an article in response to Darwin’s work, concerned about the future of human consciousness. In it, he had an epiphany:

“Why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?”^⁠4 Predating Spretnak and Kingsnorth by 150 years, he predicted that evolution would lead to a new kingdom of life parasitic upon us.

Popova writes that AI may be on the brink of fulfilling Butler’s prediction: As technocrats assemble their third kingdom of AI, modeling its intelligence after our own, we will soon be its guinea pigs: deconstructed by a force as parasitic and predatory as we are.

We may soon find out to our detriment that Butler’s prophecy will turn out to be more earthshaking than Darwin’s original work.

xxx

²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlene_Spretnak

³https://www.the-tls.com/politics-society/social-cultural-studies/against-the-machine-paul-kingsnorth-book-review-bill-mckibben

⁴https://orionmagazine.org/article/natural-intelligence/

An Epiphany with a Raven Gives Me Hope

2025-09-21T08:54:00.002-04:00

photo by author

I’ve enjoyed communing with ravens during trips out West, but especially here in Northwood, where I often meet a pair of ravens who have a nest near my house.

Recently, Russet and I left the house and drove down the dirt road next to us, which my father called the “Wild Hawk Road.” We were heading toward a somewhat distant hike, even though it was late in the day, when I spotted one of my ravens hopping beside the road. When he saw me, he stopped, and we locked eyes. At that moment, a more pleasant and closer hike popped into my mind. I hadn’t considered the possibility before because it was always off-limits, as it was in an active Boy Scout camp. I had forgotten it had recently been shut down.

What transpired between me and the Raven I call mind-reading, while scientists call it a “theory of mind.” That’s according to Christine Webb in her new book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters.^⁠1

You may say I’m imagining my connection to the raven, but I prefer to believe otherwise: I derive pleasure from the way this experience transformed me from a mundane, rational calculator into a sentient creature encountering an unforeseen connection to the natural world.

In a word, it made my day!

It shifted my mind from its small-minded fixation on relentless human dominance – controlling every facet of our lives –to the ethic Webb proposes, based on humility and reciprocity with the rest of nature.

For Webb, human arrogance is an ideology that has done us a grave harm. Because we have long viewed our species as special, as God’s gift to the Earth, we have been conditioned to believe everything we do is privileged, an inescapable result of divine intent.. Like the patriarchy, which I think is a related ideology, it denies participation to anyone not belonging to the dominant group.

But, in reality, we are but one small cog, among countless others, in a vast interconnected web. So then, what does it really mean to be human, Webb asks: “Our first hint might come from the word “human” itself—which derives from the root word humus, meaning “earth.” To be human thus means to be of the earth, not apart from or better than any of the other beings with whom we share this planet.”^⁠2

Webb urges us to switch from our usual, small-minded, egotistic self to an Earth-based version where all species are interconnected as one. This can lead to a secondary benefit: a spontaneous eruption of awe, difficult to describe because it transcends our ordinary experience.

According to Peter Wehner in Atlantic Magazine, research shows that “awe provides us with a greater sense of purpose and meaning. It encourages an appreciation for beauty and creativity. It can improve our mood and sense of well-being, make us more curious and less self-occupied.” When we see ourselves in the context of wonder, it makes us humbler.^⁠3

Wehner cites the clinical psychologist David Elkins, who rhapsodizes, “Awe is a lightning bolt that marks in memory those moments when the doors of perception are cleansed and we see with startling clarity what is truly important in life.”

That’s what the lightning flash was between that bird and me: my sudden epiphany that all life on Earth is kin, that we are all multiple intelligences on a spectrum. The fact that life is more mysterious than we usually believe is a reason for hope, Webb writes.

She would agree with Robecca Solnit, who has written: “Optimism says that everything will be fine no matter what, just as pessimism says that it will be dismal no matter what. Hope is a sense of the grand mystery of it all, the knowledge that we don’t know how it will turn out, that anything is possible.”⁠^⁠4

And she’s right!

¹Webb, Christine. The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters (p. 4).. Kindle Ed

²Ibid, p.262-263.

³https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/awe-wonder-political-emotion-darkness-overcome/684209/

⁴https://www.guernicamag.com/rebecca-solnit-the-arc-of-justice-and-the-long-run/

Can we live a good and dignified life in these chaotic and uncertain times?

2025-09-17T10:23:00.003-04:00

Max Ernst, The Fireside Angel (1937)

This has been a traumatic week for our country with the killing of conservative icon Charlie Kirk, the latest in an escalating series of violence against our political leaders from both sides of the aisle.

The core of a democracy relies on our ability to participate in politics without fear of violence. Alarmingly, we may be on the brink of losing that. Some predict a return to the political violence of the 1960s when MLK, JFK, RFK, among others, were killed. Others warn of a second Civil War.

By chance, I am reading a book by Steven Batchelor that suggests a solution, “Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times.” Batchelor is a Buddhist whose focus is on how to live a good, fulfilling life in the here-and-now, not angling for a faraway, promised land called nirvana.

The seeds for Batchelor’s new work germinated when he decided to study the roots of Hellenic Greek philosophy because of similarities he discerned with Buddhism. While I knew the Buddha’s revolutionary teachings transformed Asia and Socrates laid the foundations of Western philosophy, I had no inkling that the Buddha and Socrates both walked the earth at the same time.

Both these exemplary thinkers play a prominent role in his new book because, although they never met, each addressed “in a radically new and surprisingly similar way the core questions of how to lead a good, just, and dignified life amid turbulence and violence.”^⁠1

Both men shared a commitment to an ‘ethics of uncertainty and focused on how to lead a good life in this world, by questioning everything and embracing productive doubt. Both men stressed that “[t]o embark on a path of human flourishing requires the creativity to imagine another way of living in this world…creativity was not a quality that some gifted people possessed and others did not; it was available to everyone. Creativity is the art of solving problems.”^⁠2

It is these qualities of creativity and imagination – often dismissed as squishy by hardheaded pragmatists - that are critical to living a moral life. It is precisely these attributes that enable us to empathize with others, envision the consequences of our actions, and picture potential futures.

Batchelor shows us how these facilities are crucial for an ‘ethics of uncertainty,’ allowing individuals to envision alternative ways of living and respond in ways that are appropriate, principled, and peaceful.^⁠3

***

The Buddha and Socrates lived during turbulent, violent, and deeply uncertain times, much like our own. Philosophers and religious teachers emerged to explore ways of responding to the novel situations in which people found themselves. “The philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term “axial age” to describe this fervent and creative moment in human history.^⁠4”

Today, who can doubt that we now live in a new “axial age,” marked, once again, by rampant uncertainty, violence, and unrest? During the last axial age, philosophers and religious leaders stepped up. That won’t be enough today. This time, it will be necessary for us all to step up and put our shoulders to the wheel.

A good role model is Spike Lee, and the example he sets in his new movie, “Highest 2 Lowest.” It is about a movie mogul who risks everything by choosing to make caring, ethical choices in a life-or-death situation, rather than succumbing to the mandate of today’s selfish, cut-throat culture.

The entire plot is structured around this central moral dilemma, with the film's climax and ending reinforcing the importance of integrity over profit. We need to do more to reward such virtuous models.

Charlie Kirk said it all: “What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have a reasonable disagreement where violence is not an option.”^⁠5

xxx

¹Blurb from Amazon’s promo of the book

²Batchelor, Stephen. Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times (p. 119). Kindle Ed.

³https://tricycle.org/podcast/stephen-batchelor-ethics/

⁴Batchelor, Stephen. Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times Kindle Edition. Page 3.

⁵https://nypost.com/2025/09/10/opinion/charlie-kirk-was-all-about-debate-this-killing-is-an-attack-on-free-speech-itself/

Stillness

2025-09-01T11:51:00.004-04:00

A pitch-dark rock nestling into the sand at the swirling edge
of the surf in Kittery this week

Something about this stone enthralled me, taking me to a place of stillness beyond thought. As Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr has written: “Silence is a kind of thinking that is not thinking. It is a kind of thinking that sees.” It’s not surprising, then, that I can best capture this feeling with a photograph, not words.

If I could crystallize the spirit of such stillness with words, it would be in the form of a myth. Although not a mythologist, I tried composing the initial stanza of such a fable:

“Long ago, when the ocean still believed itself master of all things, there appeared a stone on the shore: small, black as obsidian, smooth as if it had been polished by centuries of hands. Where other stones were swallowed, this one endured. It did not resist with brute force but with patience, nestling deeper in the sand, shifted subtly with the tide but always returning unharmed.”

Joan Halifax, the Buddhist anthropologist, tells us that indigenous people live this myth every day of their lives. As such, they provide us with a proven guide on how to repair our falling-apart world. “This wisdom cannot be told, but it is to be found by each of us in the direct experience of silence, stillness, solitude, simplicity…and vision. [They understand] our interconnectedness with all of creation. They know as well as I do that these words are intellectual concepts until this self is directly experienced.^⁠^⁠1

Seeking silence has been crucial in maintaining my sanity during these chaotic times, as our democracy teeters along with much of life on our precious little blue planet. I believe that acknowledging the wisdom displayed by indigenous people could be a lifesaver for us, serving as a bridge to a new spirituality—one that is able to heal not only our hearts but also our society and the natural world.

The Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr considers silence to be “the very foundation of all reality. He tells us it is from stillness that all being comes and to which all things return.” Unless we learn to live there, “the rest of things—words, events, relationships, identities—all become rather superficial, without depth or context.^⁠”^⁠2

In the religious world, God is considered to be “the foundation of all reality.” Some view God as universal consciousness. I believe Buddhists have always held this view. Here’s what Larry Rosenberg recently wrote in Tricycle, a Buddhist publication: When the mind becomes silent, it becomes preconceptual, beyond words. In this state of being present, “we channel the energy that animates the whole universe.”^⁠3

In what seems like an unlikely twist, over the last hundred years, science has been converging on the same conclusion. It started with Max Planck, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918 for radically changing our understanding of matter and energy by laying the foundation for quantum mechanics.

Sounding like the Priest Richard Rohr I quoted above, Planck issued the following declaration: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”^⁠4

Since then, Planck’s position has been steadily endorsed by more scientists.. In a recent book, complexity theorist Neil Theise provides us with a poetic description of this new view: “Our brains aren't fleshy computers that create consciousness but, instead, act like transducers that connect us to a single, all-encompassing consciousness in the same way my tiny transistor radio could link up to a rock and roll radio station when I was a teenager.^⁠”^⁠5

I’d say that’s a strong statement in support of spirituality. It aligns with the indigenous worldview that through stillness, we enter a world where we are all connected. I believe that it is this preconceptual wisdom that must be incorporated into a new myth if we are to prosper as a species.

xxx

¹Joan Halifax. The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom (Kindle Locations 1417-1421). Kindle Edition.

²Rohr, Richard. Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation (pp. 1-2). Franciscan Media. Kindle Edition.

³https://tricycle.org/article/a-few-words-about-silence/

⁴The Observer (25 January 1931) (via Wikiquote)

⁵Theise, Neil. Notes on Complexity (p. 153). Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition.

Exploring a Third Way

2025-08-25T08:35:00.000-04:00

“I had to photograph this jubilant orphan, who beat the odds and flourished
after her seed washed up on a lonely rocky shore in Kittery, ME.”

Reflecting on my tiger lily’s triumph over adversity has inspired me to examine the impact of random and unexpected events on our lives. For the tiger lily, whose species originated in China, it involved only a blind will to survive. However, for us humans, unexpected random events are usually not life or death. Yet, how we handle them has far-reaching consequences, altering the trajectory of our lives.

We can either view random and unforeseen events as an unwarranted disruption or a serendipitous creative force. When I was creating structural landscapes as a wall builder, I often started out with strong convictions about how to proceed, but then had to yield to realities on the ground. As Gregory Bateson, the visionary ecologist, cautioned us, “a map is not the territory.” In a similar manner, the map you plot in your head to follow in life will not include the steep mountains and unexpected abysses you will undoubtedly encounter.

In the same manner, I never know where I will end up when I start writing. One word prompts the next, one thought leads to another, and pretty soon, I have left the world I intended to write about far behind.

Until recently, it was generally believed that there were only two strategies for handling the random and unforeseen in life: A person could either pursue “a happy life,” pursuing security, stability, and having money with free time to spend it. The alternative was to strive for “a meaningful life” based on high moral standards, strong principles, and a burning desire to make a difference in the world.^⁠1

In my younger years, I held both of these paths in such high regard that I couldn’t choose. I blamed myself for being too weak-kneed to make a firm decision and then have the gumption to follow through. I believe this is a common dilemma for many people.

Recently, I found an alternative that could set us free.

Rather than having to choose between a happy life or a meaningful one, psychologists Shigehiro Oishi and Erin Westgate have come up with a third option: “We propose that ‘psychological richness’ is another, neglected aspect of what people consider a good life. Unlike happy or meaningful lives, psychologically rich lives are best characterized by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences.”^⁠2

Sometimes we become so fixated on happiness that we try to capture it by living a life chasing only positive feelings and comfort. But if we hope to achieve psychological richness, we must embrace all aspects of our lives, even the unpleasant, Oishi and Westgate write. “Discomfort is a sign that you’re growing,”^⁠3

According to Psychology Today, “Psychological richness entails accepting life as it happens, in its entirety. “If we consider stories that we accumulate and share with others as the currency of psychological richness, many of our experiences can lend new insights and propel us towards growth, thus adding up to wealth.^⁠4”

Consider this column about the orphan tiger lily an example of this new currency of psychological richness..

xxx

¹https://medium.com/illumination/the-psychologically-rich-life-3f3bfa30343

²Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2022). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning. Psychological Review, 129(4), 790–811. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000317

³Ibid.

⁴https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-cultures/202205/how-to-live-a-psychologically-rich-life

My life has been like a broken pot

2025-08-20T10:42:00.001-04:00

A pit-fired pot given to me by Dwight Graves*

I’ve always admired people who discovered their true purpose in life as teenagers, pushed through to achieve their goal despite all obstacles, and ended up with a fulfilling career. That’s not me.

My sense of purpose as a high school senior was directed toward escaping the confines of rural NH. I wanted to study psychology after reading Sigmund Freud. I was lucky enough to be accepted at Columbia in the heart of the Big Apple.

I had to work hard to catch up with my classmates, many of whom had attended prestigious private schools. Between studying a lot and being shy, I felt lonely. But worse, my excitement about psychology was soon extinguished because Columbia’s psychology department was fixated on hard science: stimulus and response as measured by experiments with white rats in Skinner boxes.

Rather than showing grit, I waved the white flag, gave up, and dropped out during my third semester. Rudderless and, partly as an olive branch to my disappointed father, I joined the Navy, which had been a valued part of his life. For the next three years, I learned a lot about human nature and small-group psychology while cruising the rivers of Vietnam and raising hell in bars across the Far East.

After the Navy, I enrolled at UNH. I soon found a new, compelling purpose in life after taking courses with Professor Bobick, who had an exquisite grasp of sociology in its philosophical (starting with Homer) and literary roots. He wrote me a recommendation stating I was one of his most promising students.

I chose a graduate program with generous tuition assistance, despite its orientation not being a good fit for me. Spending long, sedentary hours in sterile classrooms, I felt trapped like a frisky puppy perpetually confined to a timeout cage.

I tried twice and dropped out each time. Because my sense of purpose was again lacking, I found myself thrown out into the real world without an occupation.

Almost by accident, I ended up working as a self-employed mason building dry-laid stone walls, a skill I picked up during summer jobs in construction. I enjoyed doing hard physical labor, sweating under the hot sun. I loved being my own boss, which was an important discovery. As a bonus, I enjoyed the artistic side of doing high-end stone work.

My original plan was to earn enough money building walls during the summer to take the winter off and write. But I ended up writing very little, once again, because of a lack of clear purpose. After a decade of this routine, my creative self felt cramped. Still, out of inertia, I soldiered on for another 10 years until my joy of working bareback under the hot sun took its toll, resulting in three different skin cancers.

Seeking a change, I hoped a Master’s Degree would help me get published as a freelance writer, so I applied to Antioch Graduate School in Keene, returning once again to psychology. This time, the program was not about helping people, not manipulating white rats.

As I was still working as a stone mason, the grind was relentless. Many times I was tempted to drop out, but paying back 26K without a degree for a soon-to-be 50-year-old divorced man was too much to contemplate.

As it turned out, I thrived as a therapist. Working at my first job with combat veterans with PTSD at Vet Centers gave my life meaning, along with an unbreakable sense of obligation. I took my responsibility seriously, going to bed early with no excess partying. I learned work habits that have since then held me in good stead.

Then I transitioned to the civilian world, working as a therapist at a Community Health Center, and then moving on to private practice before mostly retiring in 2021. With more free time, during this transition, I found myself devoting more time to photography and writing.

Since the 1980s, I have done some writing: a few freelance pieces and occasional columns for the Concord Monitor, sometimes as a member of the Monitor Board of Contributors. In retirement, I decided to challenge myself by trying to write a column every week for the Monitor. I wanted to see if I had anything to say and, if I did, whether the Monitor would publish it.

So far, they have.

Writing here today about the many twists and turns in my life has given me a key insight: While a few folks may develop a long, lasting sense of purpose, most don’t. And I’m one of them. Rather than a single clear purpose, mine has meandered and shifted course due to the slings and arrows of life.

My sense of purpose is more like kintsugi, a Japanese art form where broken pottery is glued back together and then the cracks are dusted with gold. Instead of disguising the damage, kintsugi highlights the breaks, transforming them into unique and beautiful features.

This practice is not just about repairing objects; it embodies a philosophical approach that embraces imperfection and the beauty of a repaired object's history.

That’s the way we should all think about our lives.

xxx

* Dwight Graves was a well-known local potter from Warner, a peace activist, musician, Vietnam vet, and NH “Educator of the Year”

What if humans went extinct next Friday

2025-08-13T09:33:00.004-04:00

CC Jean Stimmell

Yes, we might think we’re invincible and capable of doing everything on our own, like John Wayne or James Bond; that is, until we suffer a serious injury, illness, or reach old age. That’s when we develop a little humility and realize we’re not isolated islands, solitary individuals who must rely solely on ourselves to navigate what is hyped as a dog-eat-dog world. At that moment, we see that, at our core, we are all interdependent in the Buddhist sense of the word.

But it takes a lot to wake us up to this fact.. That’s what Mark Taylor attempts to do in a podcast with Sean Illing, basing a discussion of Taylor’s book “After the Human.”^⁠1

Why is it so hard for us to acknowledge that we are all interdependent beings, dependent for our survival on Mother Earth? Healthy ecosystems are as critical for us as an oxygen line is for a deep-sea diver. Intellectually, I know this to be true, and occasionally I actually experience feeling that way, one with the universe, after my ego dissolves during meditation.

But, regrettably, upon reentering the hubbub of everyday life, my ego quickly elbows itself back to life, sweet-talking me into eating red meat, not recycling enough, and often buying things on Amazon rather than shopping locally. Once again, I am hypnotically following the yellow brick road of our modern times.

There are numerous reasons why culture has conspired to separate me from nature, a circumstance we find most common in Western societies.

The Bible laid the groundwork by asserting that God gave humankind dominion over the Earth. René Descartes separated the human mind from the physical world. The rise of agriculture and urban centers distanced humans from natural environments. The scientific revolution marked a shift from mystical and spiritual views of nature to a more rational and mechanistic perspective.

Yes, we can make excuses, but still, many of us know better. Yet despite the consequences being severe, we can’t seem to cut the apron strings. It appears to be a quirk of human nature that we only respond to a threat when it’s close upon us, like only reacting to a sabertooth tiger when it’s poised to pounce and sever our jugular.

When the emergency isn’t pressing, we tend to procrastinate by watching the latest Netflix series instead of pondering our own extinction. That’s why Mike Taylor entitled his podcast “What if humans went extinct next Friday?” He is trying to get our attention by upping the ante.

And, oh, the stakes are so high:

Twenty-seven girls and staff recently drowned in an epic flash flood at a Texas camp; once again this summer, we are coughing and wheezing from raging Canadian forest fires. All around the world, we are witnessing unprecedented heat waves, droughts, floods, rising sea levels, and species extinction – at rates 1000-10,000 times greater than the natural, background rate before human interference.^⁠2

Taylor concludes, “We know everything we need to know to do what we know we ought to do, and yet we cannot do it, or we seem unable to do it. It's not just because of individuals making poor choices, it's because we've created a culture and a set of incentives and disincentives that push us in the direction that we're going.”^⁠3

If he is right that the human race will soon be toast, we should indeed be pondering what happens “After the Human.”

xxx

Photo Credit: A still-life I posed in my backyard

Footnotes:

¹After the Human: A Philosophy for the Future by Mark C. Taylor. Columbia University Press. 2005.

²https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/what-is-the-sixth-mass-extinction-and-what-can-we-do-about-it#:~:text=Currently%2C%20the%20species%20extinction%20rate,support%20current%20and%20future%20generations.

³podcast referenced above with Mark Taylor

A call for young people to man the barricades

2025-08-11T09:03:00.000-04:00

Waving Goodbye to our Democracy
CC Jean Stimmell

For the second time in my life, I hear a low, rumbling sound growing louder each day. It serves as a warning of what I hope will be a major earthquake—a seismic release of long-suppressed rage at our aging, faltering leaders of both parties who, through arthritic paralysis, created an opening for Donald J. Trump, a petty dictator, to take control. Exploiting our elderly politicians’ lack of vision and charisma, he has seized the reins and is guiding us like lemmings off an existential cliff called Planet Earth.

I’m old enough to have felt this tremor before, when the repressed, sanctimonious 1950s crumbled beneath a massive earthquake called the sixties. We had our own slogan back then: “Question Authority.” Another popular saying from those days was “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

We challenged our elders because they were fixated on the status quo, obsessed with looking back at past glory rather than moving forward. And now, it’s happening again!

Questioning authority for us in the sixties was a fundamental challenge to the entrenched, wealthy elites who were feathering their own nests at the expense of ordinary people. It also challenged the repressive social norms of the 1950s, which felt like a throwback to the Victorian Age.

When we were young, we had a president who, rather than admitting defeat in Vietnam, kept the war going by sacrificing 58,000 of our generation as cannon fodder in his illegal, immoral war.

Additionally, he orchestrated a break-in of the Democratic National Committee, hoping to gather dirt on his opponent to help him win a second term as president.

This petty theft was a misdemeanor compared to his war crimes. But back then, Republicans refused to tolerate his corruption: they joined with the Democrats and drove him from office. Unfortunately, Republicans today have turned belly up to Trump. Our precious democracy is now facing a far greater threat than it did under Nixon.

And it’s not just me rehashing old sixties memories.

Thomas Friedman, columnist, author, and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who is usually circumspect and scholarly, had this to say about Trump last week: “Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.”^⁠1

Off the top of my head, here’s a quick list of what Trump has already accomplished in only six months. He has assembled a secretive, masked army called ICE, reminiscent of the Gestapo, abducting suspected immigrants off the street and disappearing them.

He’s following Hitler’s playbook of scapegoating a minority; this time, it is immigrants, confining them to black site prison camps and foreign prisons that resemble concentration camps. Even more horrifying, according to CBS News, he is "looking into" how to send "homegrown criminals" who are Americans to foreign prisons.^⁠2 Then, no one will be safe, because, in Trump’s eyes, any person who dares to oppose him is a criminal.

Trump is breaking the law by using our military to suppress peaceful protests against his overreach; he is criminalizing colleges, intimidating law firms, hindering the judiciary, and, as I write this, planning to have the FBI arrest Texas lawmakers.

Perhaps, worst of all, Trump, on his first day in office, reversed the Biden administration’s policies on climate change and scientific integrity, instructing federal agencies to prioritize fossil fuels over renewable energy.^⁠3

Sadly, I agree with Thomas Friedman, who concluded his column by writing, “though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don’t know how we will get it back.”^⁠4

We are not headed toward authoritarianism: we are in it. Time is growing short to save our democratic way of life.

The time to resist and rebel is NOW!

xxx

¹https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/opinion/columnists/friedman-trump-labor-firing.html

²https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-homegrown-criminals-foreign-prisons-cecot/

³https://www.aip.org/fyi/trump-reverses-climate-policies-on-first-day-in-office

⁴Ibid

Is this déjà vu all over again?

2025-06-18T10:17:00.005-04:00

A snapshot of the 5000-8000 people that organizers estimate attended the Concord “No Kings” rally

Is this déjà vu all over again? Look at the similarities between what’s happening today and the 1960s: America is again divided between two warring ideologies, the National Guard is being deployed against demonstrators, and the president is abusing his power.

Serge Schmeman recently wrote in the NYT that “the big difference is in the spirit of the times, the sense back then that change was possible and today that doors are being closed.”

I agree that the 1960s were fueled by hope and idealism, and for me personally, it represented freedom, an escape from the death grip of what came before.

Looking back on it, growing up in the 1950s felt like a stifling straitjacket, not the carefree, idealized world of “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best.” I was one of the lucky ones, a middle-class, white boy, but even as that privileged kid, I knew something was wrong.

Things like McCarthy’s reign of terror, blacklisting liberals he accused of being Communists, led my father to confide in me when I was little that I should always be careful about what I tell people because it could come back to ruin my life.

A quick aside to describe the political climate in NH during that era:

William Loeb was the ultra-conservative publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, by far the most influential news voice in New Hampshire. Loeb was a henchman of McCarthy and was in cahoots with the John Birch Society, an organization so far right that it accused President Eisenhower of treason for being a communist.^⁠1

Not surprisingly, Meldrim Thompson, a three-time governor of NH, was a close ally of Loeb. He is perhaps best known for his “Axe the Tax” campaign, which haunts NH to this day, and for attempting to arm the NH National Guard with nuclear weapons at a time when protestors were trying to shut down the Seabrook Nuclear Reactor.

Now back to my childhood: I remember my feelings of imminent doom in grammar school, waiting for the Russian atomic bombs to fall while crouching under my desk at school in “duck and cover” drills, while neighbors were building bomb shelters.

When I got older, I recall being baffled about why I was taunted as queer if I patted a male friend on the back or wore yellow on Thursdays. And the biggest prohibition of them all, as if etched on a tablet by God Himself: No sex before marriage.

The whole gamut of my childhood milieu generated in me a confused and incoherent rage, which I released by hard drinking and carousing with the wild crowd. It was only after serving in Vietnam that I was able to put my finger on the source of my torment.

Unfortunately, for slow learners like me, it required taking part in a murderous assault on Vietnam for it to sink in what an oppressive atmosphere I had been nurtured in: it opened my eyes to see my childhood movie hero, John Wayne, for who he really was: A slaughterer of Native Americans – just as we were slaughtering indigenous people in Asia.

Joining the anti-war movement was like a breath of fresh air and an instant education: as my mask of denial fell away, I was sensitized to the discrimination that my new black, brown and gay friends endured daily.

And then there was the largest group of all, grossly discriminated against and shunted to the shadows: I’m talking about women, relegated to running the mimeograph machines for the peace movement in the beginning, but, who also saw the light and rebelled, demanding to be equal partners, beginning a fight for their own liberation.

Yes, the Sixties spelled liberation for us all

Consequently, as Frank Senso, former CNN Washington bureau chief, has written, “we live in a far more open, inclusive, tolerant, and equal America than at any other time in our history”^⁠2.

But today, that is all at risk.

As Leonard Steinhorn has warned in Salon Magazine, Donald Trump is not just waging battles against the press, immigrants, voting rights, the environment, science, social welfare programs, Planned Parenthood and the deep state.“These are mere skirmishes in a much larger conflict. The president has essentially declared an all-out war on the American 1960s.^⁠3

But as our mass protests prove – like our “No Kings Day” rally last week – we, the People, refuse to go back to the dark ages of the 1950s..

xxx

¹https://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/

²https://www.amazon.com/Greater-Generation-Defense-Baby-Legacy/dp/0312326416#:~:text=%22Lenny%20Steinhorn%20presents%20compelling%20evidence,influential%20than%20is%20commonly%20believed.%22

³https://www.salon.com/2017/07/29/donald-trumps-war-on-the-1960s_partner/

The world and I are getting fatter

2025-06-09T09:50:00.002-04:00

Getting down to the bone

Over the past few months, I have lost more than 15 pounds, not due to illness but by choice. No, I’m not taking one of those new anti-obesity pills like Ozempic.

I only needed to make one change because I already exercise and eat a healthy diet of unprocessed foods, mostly organic, with little meat. All I had to do was cut back to one small portion at mealtime—absolutely no snacks in between. I’ve even been able to continue drinking a couple of craft beers every day. The secret is: no cheating. I learned that cardinal rule 25 years ago when I quit smoking, the hardest thing I ever did.

I’m sadly aware of what will probably happen… Three or four times throughout my life, I have made similar efforts to lose weight. Each time, I was successful in shedding 10 or 15 pounds. However, over time, my iron will melted and within a year, I had gained back the weight I had lost.

Of course, overeating is not just my problem – it is a worldwide epidemic, and getting worse, as the Guardian has warned: "464 million people aged between 10 and 24 [are] predicted to be obese or overweight by 2030 – 143 million more than in 2015.”^⁠1

Two disclaimers before I proceed: It is not my intention to shame folks who weigh a certain amount. I’m aware people come in a wide variety of body types, from ultra-skinny to extra-wide, and that cultural norms vary significantly in terms of what is considered attractive.

I’m also not a fan of the media’s current obsession with health and wellness, which I think has gone off the rails. For me, nearing 80, I need to lose weight because of my medical conditions, not because of chattering advice on social media.

However, every so often, a new medical procedure or drug emerges that challenges our understanding of weight loss — and this is one of those times. A new class of alleged wonder drugs has recently been approved, making weight loss appear easy. Still, doctors remain divided on the subject.

It’s not a slam dunk.

On one corner, Tony Goldstone, a leading endocrinologist, argues there is no moral component to obesity, no “get a grip on yourself” solution. “If you’re slim, it’s because you won the genetic lottery, and if you struggle with obesity, it’s because you didn’t. A drug that brings down your weight by as much as 25% is a miracle.”^⁠2

On the other side are scientists like Professor Christina Vogel, whose research shows that for many, it is a “sheer impossibility” to eat well due to “a combination of economic inequalities and poor-quality, high-sugar food, mass produced and robustly defended by overweening corporate interests.” She argues that creating a new class of drugs like Ozempic sidesteps the root cause of poor health.

I’m on the side of Professor Vogel on this one.

These new drugs, while enriching pharmaceutical companies, come at a high cost, not only to our pocketbooks but perhaps to our health. The long-term effects of weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic are unknown.

Folks from my generation recall Thalidomide, the widely used drug prescribed for nausea in pregnant women during the 1950s and early 1960s that turned out to cause severe birth defects in thousands of children. Just today, in breaking news as I write this piece, ABC News has revealed animal studies indicating that these new weight loss drugs may cause birth defects. [https://abcnews.go.com/Health/uk-warning-weight-loss-drugs-effect-birth-control/story?id=122527179]

Is this deja vu all over again?

Even if these drugs are proven safe, they are like an addiction because they must be taken for life. However, a recent JAMA analysis found that a vast majority of patients stop taking these drugs within two years and regain most of the weight they had lost within one year.

The real solution is government intervention: not to dictate what we should eat, but to educate the consumer. Most importantly, we must switch the food subsidies we currently give to highly processed foods to wholesome, natural foods instead.

As Johanna Ralston, the chief executive of the World Obesity Federation, has stated: “The rise in obesity and related diseases is not just a matter of individual choices – it’s the result of environments flooded with health-harming products including ultra-processed food… “Governments must act urgently to create healthier food and health systems.”

To give the devil his due, Robert Kennedy is right on this one.

xxx

¹https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/20/young-people-obesity-2030-report

²https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/13/the-toxic-debate-about-obesity-rages-on-but-at-least-we-know-if-mounjaro-or-wegovy-is-better-for-weight-loss

Mary Oliver and Military Parades

2025-06-03T11:46:00.000-04:00

One of the first of Hitler's Military Parades in 1939
Wikipedia Commons

"Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled - to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery. I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing - that the light is everything - that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do." -Mary Oliver, House of Light

In this stanza, Mary Oliver, New England’s most beloved poet, hits the nail on the head. Awe is what we all need more of, especially in today’s cruel world of climate crisis, existential uncertainty, and Donald Trump.

On this subject, Dacher Keltner has written a remarkable book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.^⁠1 Tackling a topic that has always been devilishly hard to define, he has successfully shifted awe from a mysterious, fleeting feeling into a serious subject of study.

Krista Tippett considers his research “One of the most fascinating developments of our time … that human qualities we have understood in terms of virtue — experiences we’ve called spiritual — are now being taken seriously by science as intelligence — as elements of human wholeness.”^⁠2

Keltner tells us how transformational awe can be: “By quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.”^⁠3

It is precisely these qualities that have provided humans with an advantage in our evolutionary journey. Our ancestors who formed groups exhibiting awe-inspiring patterns of behavior had a higher survival rate against both known and unknown threats.

That’s because experiencing awe, by definition, means being grounded in the present, which maximizes our ability to counter threats.

All of this led Keltner to conduct further research into these enchanted moments when we experience a sense of wonder and confront mysteries that transcend our understanding. He found that these feelings are universal in societies around the world, bringing many benefits: “joy, meaning, and community, along with healthier bodies and more creative minds.”

I’ve written previously about how empathy is a skill that, if cultivated by more people, could transform society.

Keltner asserts that the same applies to awe; if we could only slow down and take the time to savor the moment. It doesn’t have to be – and usually isn’t – grandiose vistas like the Grand Canyon. Instead, it’s often mundane everyday events that can be awe-inspiring if we could just get out of our heads and truly taste the present: to smell the roses, be blown away by a neighbor’s wisdom, or be captivated by a playful pattern of light dancing across our kitchen wall.

Keltner also noted that people enjoy gathering together: “People walking to work, little kids going to a dance class, people at a picnic, people lining up to get onto a bus. We just have this tendency to start to move together.”

Emile Durkheim, the renowned French sociologist, termed this natural inclination “collective effervescence:” the intense feeling of energy, unity, and excitement that arises when people come together in shared experiences. It’s that oceanic sensation of being part of something greater than oneself, often accompanied by profound emotions and a sense of social cohesion.^⁠4

But, in this case, I believe that we must proceed with caution.

I fully support the natural feelings of awe that arise from everyday occurrences evoking wonder and amazement, such as the expression on a baby’s face or a stunning sunset. However, when people unite in collective effervescence, situations can spiral out of control, as seen when sports fans attack supporters of the opposing team or political rallies escalate into violence.

This becomes absolutely true when awe is not spontaneous but is engineered by a political leader to strengthen their control over the people: I’m talking about Hitler’s flashy mass rallies, which were key to consolidating his power.

Or Donald Trump’s upcoming military parade, scheduled for June 14^th, which also happens to be his birthday.

xxx

¹The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life . Kindle Ed.

²https://onbeing.org/programs/dacher-keltner-the-thrilling-new-science-of-awe/

³The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. p. xx.

⁴https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_effervescence

Whatever happened to being generous, truthful, and just?

2025-05-26T11:03:00.000-04:00

CC Jean Stimmell

Wandering around Portsmouth, Russet and I stumbled upon the ornate tomb of Enoch Parrot in St. John’s churchyard. Parrot was born in Portsmouth and rose to the rank of admiral, playing a noteworthy role in the Civil War.

What struck us was not the homage to this war hero but rather what was engraved prominently on the front of his tomb: a description of the kind of man he was: generous, truthful, and just. Those noble words seem so anachronistic—a flashback to a time when we celebrated ethical values, so different from the dog-eat-dog world we cower in today, a victim of Trump’s mean-spirited transactionalism and the cutthroatness of big business.

It’s obvious we are not the same America we used to be: We’ve regressed from striving to uphold the principles of freedom and equality into a mindless consumer society in complete denial about the existential problems we face. Sadly, we have become addicted to Amazon, social media, and pie-in-the-sky politics, tuning out the urgent problems of today.

Lost in trivia, we have surrendered to a carnival barker named Donald Trump, anointing him as our savior: An audacious pied piper who promises to set us free by scraping every tradition, principle, and value that America used to hold dear.

This quest for freedom without responsibility is an affront to our destiny and will inevitably lead to our downfall: That’s what an acclaimed critic from the last century claims in a book I’m reading.

“Freedom and Destiny” is the name of the book: It was written in 1981 by Rollo May, an acclaimed existentialist psychologist, who had a local New Hampshire connection: he summered on Squam Lake, where he often went sailing with his friend Paul Tillich, perhaps the most influential theologian of the 20^th century.

May was prescient: he could see the storm clouds gathering back then, which have intensified into the storm we are experiencing now. He claimed that freedom is in crisis because we have totally ignored our destiny.

As an existentialist, he understood that we are not masters of our destiny, as Trump would have us believe. For most of us, the reverse is true: we are slaves to our destiny. This is because much of our lives is governed by forces beyond our control. These inevitable and unchangeable aspects of existence, shaping and limiting our lives, are what May calls our destiny.

Real freedom comes by accepting the limits that destiny places upon us. At first, that leads to despair, but May argues that’s a good thing, like an alcoholic finally admitting they have a problem.

But we are still in denial, unable to admit we have a problem.

We distract ourselves from the existential problems that threaten to do us in: extreme inequality, nuclear war, and climate catastrophe, along with our neglect in bearing witness to the abject suffering all around us, proliferating from famine, poverty, and violence.

We should feel despair! But that’s not what Americans have ever done. It is our most glaring shortcoming. Instead, we bury our heads in the sands of “shopping until we drop.”

May says that must change: “The function of despair is to wipe away our superficial ideas, our delusionary hopes, our simplistic morality… It is important to remind ourselves of these points since there are a number of signs that we in America may be on the threshold of a period as a nation when we shall no longer be able to camouflage or repress our despair.”

Opening up to despair, according to May, is not only crucial to our survival, it is the key to our happiness: “In this sense despair, when it is directly faced, can lead to joy. After despair, the one thing left is possibility. We all stand on the edge of life, each moment comprising that edge. Before us is only possibility. This means the future is open—as open as it was for Adam and Eve.”^⁠1

After accepting our destiny, we discover that within these restraints, there is ample space to make choices, which is what gives life its meaning. However, not all options are equal: To cope with the stark reality of our modern existence, we have no choice but to return to humanity’s perennial values, which have always been our savior when we had nowhere else to turn..

We can start by practicing the Golden Rule. Or, living up to the words engraved on Admiral Parrott’s tomb to be “generous, truthful, and just.”

xxx

¹May, Rollo. Freedom and Destiny (Norton Paperback) (p. 242).. Kindle Edition.

Confronting the rubbish that clutters our minds

2025-05-19T15:47:00.001-04:00

Discarded X-mas tree obscuring truth & beauty
An art shot: CC Jean Stimmell

Thomas Merton is a hero of mine, about whom I have written before. I feel close to him not only in a spiritual and intellectual sense, but also personally, as we share a thicket of contradictions about what we have written and how we have conducted our lives – a mixture of cloistered retreat and sensuous adventure.

Earlier in Merton’s life, Alan Jacob writes, “he was politically active, an eager participant in leftist demonstrations, and he grew increasingly interested in Eastern religions.”^⁠1 Whatever he wrote about was always pertinent, never stale, and, remarkably, more relevant today than it was in his day.

I also like to think we have a psychic connection. In 1968, he published his book that I like best, “Conjectures of the Guilty Bystander” (CGB). That was also the year I returned home from the trauma of Vietnam, and the same year Merton died grotesquely from accidental electrocution.

In this book, Merton was not trying to write a scholarly treatise. Instead, as he says in his preface, “These notes add up to a personal version of the world of the 1960s…They are an implicit dialogue with other minds, a dialogue in which questions are raised.”

Questions that have become even more applicable today.”

Here’s one such nugget: “The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think.”^⁠2

I’m in a constant battle to purge this insiduous, ever-increasing flotsam and jetsam from my brain. Staying focused helps, and physical exercise does too. However, what has aided the most has been opening up to spirituality: not the Catholicism of Thomas Merton, although I greatly respect it, but Eastern religion. In particular, meditation has allowed me to glimpse a deeper reality that is usually obscured by the overflowing clutter of my mind.

I’ve recently discovered that Complexity Theory complements my meditation, as espoused by Neil Theise.^⁠3 He posits, along with other scientists, that consciousness, rather than being an isolated physical component of the brain, is ubiquitous, residing within every atom in the universe, as well as in every cell of the body.

Now, whenever I’m lucky enough to enter a deep state of peace during meditation, I can name the transcendental feeling that comes over me: I’m merging with the universal consciousness of the universe.

***

Now, back to Merton: Connected to the rubbish that clutters our brains, he points out the pitfalls of overwork. Worse than just becoming discombobulated, overwork is a form of violence:

“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.”

Merton, in his wisdom, understood how a frenzied lifestyle destroys a person’s inner peace. “It destroys the fruitfulness of his work because it kills the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful.” Thanks to his guidance, I have learned to throttle down enough to savor the moment more fully.

This insidious virus I harbored, hampering my activism and peace of mind, has continued to spread until it's now an epidemic threatening our whole way of life. No one can dispute that overwork is the tyranny of today, not only for activists but also for idealists, artists, and committed, creative folks of every stripe.

In conclusion, I ask: Where are today’s prophets to guide us out of the wilderness, as Merton did for us in the 1960s?

XXX

¹https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/thomas-merton-the-monk-who-became-a-prophet

²Merton, Thomas. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Classic) (p. 72). Kindle Edition.

³“Living at the Edge of Chaos." Neil Theise

Tricycle Talk : “Living at the Edge of Chaos” Episode #88 with Neil Theise May 10, 2023

Is Western civilization an empathy weakling?

2025-05-12T08:24:00.002-04:00

Meeting Others Where They Are
Concord Farmer's Market 2019
CC Jean Stimmell

I recently objected in a ‘My Turn’ op-ed to Elon Musk’s bizarre claim that “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” This assertion is yet another example of the Trump Administration engaging in what George Orwell called “doublespeak:” fooling citizens into believing that things are the opposite of what they really are.

Classic examples of Orwellian doublespeak include “war is peace,” and “freedom is slavery.”

Musk’s statement outraged columnists across the nation. Molly Worthen in the NYT was incredulous: How can we not want children to grasp perspectives of people different from themselves?”^⁠1

Michael Ventura, author of Applied Empathy, wrote that belittling empathy is part of a deliberate strategy. He pointed out that Trump has a long track record of disparaging empathy as naïve: “casting strength as synonymous with domination, suggesting that to care is to lose—and to control is to win.”

It is classic Orwellian doublespeak, Ventura pointed out: “They want to reframe care as weakness, dignity as naïveté and trust as a liability.” He urged us not to take the bait.

Until Trump and his apostles came along, empathy had always been regarded as a moral good that promoted virtuous deeds. No longer. Sadly, these empathy nay-sayers have become an increasingly loud chorus, reaching beyond politics and business to infect even my old profession of psychology.

I was dumbfounded when I read that a psychologist like Paul Bloom would adopt a Trumpian stance, asserting that empathy is a “parochial, narrow-minded” emotion — one that “will have to yield to reason if humanity is to survive.”^⁠2

As a retired psychotherapist, I think he has gone off the deep end. So did Cameron, Inzlicht, and Cunningham in a NYT article:^⁠3 These psychologists consider empathy critical to human survival. They proved, contrary to public perceptions, that empathy is not a fixed personality trait – something you either have or you don’t. Instead, it is a skill that requires practice. It can be improved upon with effort, like learning to play tennis.

Their research shows that when individuals are made aware that empathy is a skill, they put more effort into understanding groups different from their own. Through this effort to understand, their empathy for others grew. Their conclusion: Empathy for people unlike us can be expanded simply by modifying our views about empathy.

I learned that lesson early in my clinical practice. I admit that occasionally I wasn’t drawn to a new client who, at first glance, might seem hostile, needy, or narcissistic.

But after I got to know my clients, I was able to connect with every one of them, valuing each as a unique and valuable individual. It was a natural process that required no effort on my part, with one significant caveat: I had to first get out of my head – stop my chattering, judgmental mind – to apprehend what the person before me was really saying.

Jamil Zaki has written an excellent book, “The War for Kindness,” reinforcing the notion that empathy is a skill, a skill that requires making a conscious choice to show empathy. Her conclusion is that with practice“over time, empathic choices add up—building empathic habits and, eventually, empathic people.”^⁠4

***

The empathy research I conducted revealed a very distressing aspect: studies have shown that powerful individuals exhibit less empathy than any other group. This happens because they have little incentive to interact with other people.

It is a sad commentary on our times that two such powerful billionaires have been able to buy their way to the top of our government—they exemplify how wealthy and influential individuals often exhibit negligible empathy for the downtrodden, the poor, and those who are different from themselves.

xxx

¹https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/opinion/sunday/empathy-school-college.html

²https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/empathy-is-actually-a-choice.html

³https://www.nytimes.com/2015//12/opinion/sunday/empathy-is-actually-a-choice.html

⁴https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/in_a_divided_world_we_need_to_choose_empathy

My memories of Vietnam 50 years later

2025-05-01T08:33:00.000-04:00

1966: Passing civilian ships as we prepared our maiden voyage up the My Tho River

The Vietnam War was a collective trauma that became a double-edged sword, representing both an unforgettable nightmare and the bloody spur that drove the transformational change that defined the 1960s. Alongside the Civil Rights movement, this war propelled social justice and sustainability to the forefront of our generation’s consciousness.

The conflict killed over 58000 Americans and 3 million Vietnamese, including appalling massacres at places like My Lai, where American soldiers slaughtered more than 500 women, children, and old men.^⁠1

We dropped over 5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam—the most extensive bombardment of any country in history—and more than twice as much tonnage as was dropped in all of World War II.^⁠2

The Vietnam War, in tandem with Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’, drove home the horrific dangers of pesticides, awakening the environmental movement. Vietnam stands front and center because it is an epicenter of wild species diversity, with many unique species. That was especially true before we flattened rural areas with 4 million tons of bombs, 400,000 tons of napalm, and 19 million gallons of Agent Orange^⁠3 – a curse for which I receive a VA disability.

Those of us in our generation who experienced our country running amok in the Vietnam era yearned for a simpler, more authentic, and more sustainable lifestyle.

Here’s the background to my writing this: I was sitting around, feeling sorry for myself while recuperating from an operation, when I stumbled across a mesmerizing NYT photo essay commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.^⁠4

The Vietnam photographs propelled me off the couch, overwhelmed by vivid memories of those years. As Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Vietnamese American author, wrote: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”^⁠5 Here are a few of mine:

I served in the Navy on an LST that delivered troops and equipment along the coast and into the rivers of Vietnam. I didn’t encounter much combat, but in 1968, the year I returned home, my ship, Westchester County LST 1167, was mined by Viet Cong sappers, resulting in the loss of 23 men, some of whom I knew.

The Vietnam War was personal to every American because of the sheer number of casualties and the fact that no one could feel safe because of the draft. Country Joe’s popular song expressed everyone’s worst fear: “Don’t be the first on your block to get sent home in a box.”

I grew up in Northwood but attended Pittfield High School. Among my circle of friends, two were killed in action, three returned with disabling wounds, and one committed suicide.

My personal memories wouldn’t make it onto a John Wayne highlight reel. We were relatively safe, battling only the stress and exhaustion of shuttling soldiers and armaments around, sometimes for months at a time without setting foot on land; there was no respite: 4 hours on duty and 4 hours off in the tropical heat that burned our feet through the soles of our shoes while our garbage piled up on the deck like a blossoming tent city.

I remember the suicides in our squadron: a boy found hanging in the paint locker; the boy on the midnight stern watch who disappeared into the shimmering wake sometime between 12 and 4 a.m. There were others as well. It was always the youngest and the newest: it’s quite a shock to go from your Midwestern high school basketball games to float aimlessly around in the South China Sea, halfway around the world.

I also remember with gratitude both the goodness and diversity of the men I served alongside. It still amazes me that one can assemble a crew made up of individuals from every conceivable background who, under trying circumstances, become a tight-knit clan of brothers able to overlook each other’s shortcomings and come together in camaraderie to accomplish what had to be done.

In closing, I want to remind younger generations who resent us baby boomers – sometimes for good reason – that not all of us have spurned our obligations to our fellow citizens and the natural world to live high off the hog, greedily making money at the expense of others.

Many of us shaped by the blast furnace of Vietnam have rejected America’s wasteful, consumer society and have instead worked to create a more sustainable society based on social and environmental justice.

xxx

¹https://www.history.com/articles/my-lai-massacre

²https://renewvn.org/the-most-bombed-place-on-earth/

³Ibid.

⁴https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/world/asia/vietnam-war-photography-impact.html

⁵Ibid

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization

2025-04-15T14:01:00.005-04:00

George Orwell at work
photograph by ullstein bild

According to Elon Musk, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

When I read this in the Guardian, I almost fell out of my chair. Sadly, it gets worse! This heresy is not merely a hallucination emulating from Elon’s ketamine-fueled brain: It is gaining traction not only among evangelical Christians, “who have begun to recast the pangs of empathy that might complicate their support for Donald Trump” but also Catholics in the JD Vance mold.^⁠1

This is, perhaps, the most extreme example of the Trump Administration engaging in what George Orwell called“doublespeak,” coining the word in his dystopian novel “1984:” This is a trick to try to fool citizens into believing things are the opposite of what they really are. Examples of Orwellian doublespeak include “war is peace;” and “freedom is slavery.”

“Empathy is weakness” is Elon’s over-the-top contribution to doublespeak. It flies in the face of the Golden Rule, which calls on us to treat others as we would want to be treated by them. Various expressions of this rule have been the bedrock of religions and creeds throughout the ages.

Golden Rule gained strength as recently as the Obama administration; that’s when scientists discovered “mirror cells”– a type of nerve cell that reacts both when a subject performs an action and when the subject sees that action performed by someone else.

This discovery provided a biological explanation for empathy, strengthening religion’s age-old claim. Perhaps this is what led Obama to declare that America was not suffering from a budget deficit but an empathy deficit.

What a transformation from then to now: From the height of Obama lamenting the cuts to social programs as an ‘empathy deficit’ to Musk gleefully slicing through social programs while wielding a giant chainsaw.

Many other examples of over-the-top doublespeak come to mind, like Trump’s oft-repeated mantra that he won the 2020 election in a landslide when, according to all credible sources, he lost.

But to me, Musk’s empathy statement takes the cake. Riding the wave of their unchecked power, Republicans and Musk forget history. He is a throwback to Ayn Rand, who was the darling of conservatives in the 1950s. Rand wrote popular books promoting ultimate individual freedom while showing no mercy to the weak and disadvantaged. In many ways, Musk is Rand’s clone.

This isn’t the first time Republicans, while in complete control of the government, have leaned too far over their skis and crashed in a ridiculous fashion. Just look at what happened during the McCarthy era in the 1950s when the FBI was run by J. Edgar Hoover, a right-wing zealot, much like our current director, Kash Patel.

Here’s one example.

Influenced by testimony from extremists like Rand, Hoover’s FBI issued an official report on the movie industry, including his findings on a revered Christmas classic we still watch. Hoover determined that Frank Capra’s classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” was “written by Communist sympathizers” attempting to instigate class warfare while “demonizing bankers."^⁠2

I predict future generations will reflect on the second Trump administration similarly to how we reflect on the McCarthy era of the 1950s and its baseless witch hunt against loyal Americans accused of being communists.

xxx

¹https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/08/empathy-sin-christian-right-musk-trump

²https://www.openculture.com/2014/12/ayn-rand-helped-the-fbi-identify-its-a-wonderful-life-as-communist-propaganda.html

Trump is bringing patriotism back into vogue for the rest of us

2025-04-08T10:24:00.000-04:00

"Hands Off" Protest 4/5/25 Concord NH
Photograph by Arnie Alpert

Winter is losing its grip. Even the chunks of snow that slid off my north-facing roof are almost gone. The daffodils have pushed up through matted oak leaves, and the ice went out early on Jenness Pond. It’s a time of renewal not only for Mother Nature but also for our democracy. Since his inauguration in January, President Trump has given it his best shot to become our dictator-in-chief.

But he will not prevail!

As the opposition, we were flabbergasted by the audacity of Trump’s attacks on our constitution and institutions starting on day one of his second term. We were initially struck dumb, but once it sunk in, his outrageous actions became rocket fuel, igniting us into action.

But first, a personal note: a brief return to Trump’s first term as president to explain how he restored my patriotism. It took Trump’s first brutal, authoritarian reign to open my eyes – long shuttered by my country’s often unsavory and unjust behavior – to see how special, despite its flaws, our country is.

At an emotional level, I was infuriated that Trump was able to wrap himself in the flag, anointing himself as America’s supreme patriot despite dumping on our constitution. Even more irking, he was AWOL in the war I fought in because of his lame excuse that he was physically unfit to serve because of bone spurs, despite being a star athlete in high school.

My war was a bad war, but I did my duty. Meanwhile, while Viet Cong sappers almost sank my ship on the Mekong River, killing 23 brave Americans, he was bragging that his actions were more dangerous than Vietnam: sleeping around with so many women during the AIDS epidemic.

Donald’s gift to me was to take me back to my youthful idealism, which had motivated me to enlist to fight in Vietnam. President JFK’s words inspired me: "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”¹

That’s my tale of how Trump’s shameless wrapping himself in the American flag restored my patriotism; it prompted me to buy a large American flag, which I have flown proudly ever since until it was ripped to shreds by a recent winter storm. It was a harbinger of things to come that the flag should self-destruct right as Trump began his second term.

Now, back to the present.

Since his inaugural, I have bought a replacement flag and am flying it proudly. It doesn’t seem possible, but our new president has doubled down on his crusade of destruction, ransacking our institutions, eliminating essential safety nets, and gutting our constitution.

But, thankfully, we have now regained our mojo.

We are standing tall again after being sucker punched in the gut. As the respected journalist James Fallows observed, “Americans as individuals seem suddenly willing in larger numbers to “meet the moment.” More and more people are acting as they might sometime be asked, “What did you do, when it mattered?” And they’ll have an answer.”²

We, the people, are now standing up to fight for the kind of country we want to live in. Bernie Sanders and Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez’s recent tour “Fighting Oligarchy” has drawn enthusiastic crowds, including an estimated 34,000 in Denver.³

And last Saturday, we had a day of rage with over 1200 protests in every state across our country. Here at home, as the Concord Monitor reported: “This was the sixth protest in Concord since Trump took office and was the largest by far, with organizers estimating that more than 2,000 people attended.“

On Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the protest stretched for nearly 20 blocks. In Chicago, thousands flooded Daley Plaza and adjacent streets, while, in the nation’s capital, tens of thousands surrounded the Washington Monument.⁴ Nearly 100,000 angry demonstrators gathered in Boston.⁵

After the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked, "What sort of government have you given us? A republic or a monarchy?" Franklin's response: “A republic, if you can keep it. “ He understood that democracies are fragile and won’t survive without vigilant citizens.

I had shamefully forgotten the idealism and courage that it took to build our nation. It required clear thinking, tolerance, patience, and perspective. As Tom Edmondson wrote in a letter to the Washington Post: “Throughout all time and across the face of the Earth, ours is the only nation not founded on ethnicity, territory, or religion. Ours is the only nation in human history founded on ideas, ideals, and a system of government.”⁶

These qualities that our forebearers sacrificed their lives for are desperately needed today to preserve their sparkling achievement. We saw an example of such idealism last Saturday.

xxx

¹https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/education/teachers/curricular-resources/ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you

²https://fallows.substack.com/p/standing-up-it-looks-like-this?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=ktp62&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

³https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/thousands-attend-bernie-sanders-aoc-rally-denver-push-progressive-change/

⁴https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/us/politics/anti-trump-protests-hands-off.htm

⁵https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/hands-off-protest-boston-massachusetts

⁶https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2025/patrick-henry-revolutionary-war-virginia/?itid=sf_opinions_letters-to-the-editor_p007_f003

Trust the unknown

2025-03-22T09:29:00.001-04:00

CC Jean Stimmell

Maggie Jackson wrote “Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure,” a book praising “not knowing.” This is a very counterintuitive claim because, in our gut, we all hate uncertainty: it scares us at a primal level. This fear has been baked into our genes from prehistoric times for a good reason: not knowing where our next meal was coming from could spell starvation; the rustling sound in the dark might not be the wind but a sabertoothed tiger intent on making us its next meal.

However, Jackson makes the case that nowadays, under most circumstances, embracing uncertainty is good for us. She shows us how embracing uncertainty can spark creativity, improve problem-solving skills, and help us lead better, more hopeful lives.

Of course, when it comes to uncertainty, Buddhists are way ahead of us: they have practiced “not knowing” for thousands of years, aware that life is an ever-moving target. The more confident we are that we know the right way forward in a world that is constantly reshaping itself, the less open we are to other possibilities that might have more merit.

Kaira Jewel Lingo makes this clear in this Tricycle Magazine quote from 2022 that I saved: “But when we let ourselves hang out in the space of not-knowing, there is enormous potential and life could unfold in innumerable ways. So rather than avoid and fear this place of uncertainty, we can embrace it and all its gifts.”^⁠1

But embracing uncertainty isn’t easy; it can be paralyzing.

Kaira Lingo gives an example from her own life when she was wrestling with a life-altering decision on whether to forsake her life as a nun, “questioning this vow that I had assumed would carry me through my entire life.” In that time of transition, she didn’t know who she was anymore and had no idea who she might become.

“I was in the midst of a process, like the caterpillar that must dissolve itself completely in the chrysalis to become a butterfly. It was terrifying and extremely uncomfortable when I wanted answers and clarity when I was used to knowing who I was and where I was going.”^⁠2

I believe that we as a society are now going through that same agonizing transformation as Kaira Lingo did.

We are at the end of a historical epoch, undergoing a dizzying transition into a complete unknown. As Jackson tells us, when thrown into pivotal moments like this, we have to step up to the plate and be the most clear-eyed: able to embrace uncertainty, not deny it.

Unfortunately, in highly stressful times like these – human nature being what it is – our instinctual response is to put on blinders and double down on what we think we know. This is especially true if one is an ideologue – whether on the left or the right – the urge is to beat the drum even harder.

That means that MAGA voters, rather than raising doubts about Trump’s extreme agenda, double down on whatever the president says, no matter how absurd. On the other side, if you are a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, you vilify anything MAGA.

Truly, we are in a pickle. Our culture is dissolving before our eyes while our environment is going up in smoke. Like butterflies, we are collectively entering the chrysalis; our future is fraught but unknown. We have no choice but to act with humility, accepting that none of us has all the answers. We have no choice but to work with our fellow citizens, collectively learning as we go on how to navigate this time of momentous change, disruption, and breakdown.

xxx

¹https://tricycle.org/magazine/buddhism-decision-making/?utm_source=Tricycle&utm_campaign=61a360f7d0-Daily_Dharma_02_05_2022_S&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1641abe55e-61a360f7d0-307712649

²Ibid.

Stillness

2025-03-15T13:08:00.000-04:00

Jenness Pond

“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

― Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

I am looking at a photo I took at the apex of summer. It is a hazy, sunny day, but dead still: no wind, not the slightest breeze. The world is in suspended animation: more like a painting than a living landscape. There’s no sense of foreboding, only a feeling of peace and serenity, a blessed escape from the jittery world of appearances, disconcerting like the flickering lines in the early TVs I watched as a kid.

Today, of course, things are different: TVs are now unblinking portals in technocolor looking out on a world gone bonkers while our own country is sinking fast under our spastic new president.

Seeking stillness is my safe harbor in the storm. But I'm a piker compared to pico Iver, the writer and world traveler who has carried it to an extreme. He and his wife moved to Tokyo to live in a tiny apartment without a bedroom or TV.

Pico recently wrote a fascinating little book about his transformation, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere^⁠1, based on his TED talk. In it, he argues that our perspective—not the places we visit—tells us where we stand.

He quotes Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who had this to say after spending five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic in temperatures that dipped to 70 degrees below zero: “Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.”

In many ways, Pico and I are kindred souls, like the way we feel about going places: “Every time I take a trip, the experience acquires meaning and grows deeper only after I get back home and, sitting still, begin to convert the sights I’ve seen into lasting insights.”

He quotes like-minded individuals like his friend Leonard Cohen, who spent years at Buddhist retreats: “Going nowhere isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.”

Pico follows in the tradition of Joan Halifix, a well-known Buddhist anthropologist who informs us Indigenous people live this higher truth every day of their lives: “This wisdom cannot be told, but it is to be found by each of us in the direct experience of silence, stillness, solitude, simplicity…and vision.” Their wisdom is a precious resource that could help us repair our rapidly disintegrating world.^⁠2

Echoing this indigenous wisdom, the Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr considers silence to be “the very foundation of all reality. It is that out of which all being comes and to which all things return.” Unless we learn to live there, “the rest of things—words, events, relationships, identities—all become rather superficial, without depth or context.^⁠”^⁠3

I fear that the wisdom imparted by the likes of Iver, Halifax, and Rorh is too much for our driven, information-obsessed society to absorb, chattering away like a class of kindergarteners who have gorged on too much candy and soda.

¹Iyer, Pico. The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. Kindle Edition)

²³Joan Halifax. The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom (Kindle Locations 1417-1421). Kindle Edition.

³⁴Rohr, Richard. Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation (pp. 1-2). Franciscan Media. Kindle Edition.

What rough beast is slouching toward us to be born

2025-03-11T05:46:00.000-04:00

I write on many topics, including the lyrical essay I wrote last week about growing up in the Green Forest. But do not be mistaken. My attention is riveted on Washington, where the biggest catastrophe of my long life is unfolding. President Trump and his sidekick Musk are rapidly neutering our country, bringing our democracy and open way of life to an abrupt end.

Their actions have momentous consequences beyond what ordinary language can convey. They have a mythical dimension, something only a poet can grasp. I am reminded of "The Second Coming,” a well-known poem by W.B. Yeats, written in very unsettled times, soon after the end of World War I. It describes a mysterious and powerful alternative to the Christian idea of the second coming of Jesus.^⁠1 Here is a summary of his poem:

Flying around in a widening spiral, the falcon can no longer hear its owner’s call. Things are breaking down, and their foundation is giving way. Pure destruction and lawlessness have spread across the world, and so has a tidal wave darkened by blood. This tide has swallowed all the rituals of innocence. The best people aren't motivated to act, but the worst people are impassioned and eager.^⁠2

The poem ends, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” We now know the identity of that rough beast, his “ gaze blank and pitiless as the sun:” It is Donald Trump.

The poem spells out our situation today: Two feuding sides without a center. Trump is the reason why, spurning the democrats whenever they try to find common ground.

A good example is the bipartisan immigration bill that Congress worked on for four months, representing the first significant overhaul in decades that truly addresses the root issues at the border.

But Trump opposed the legislation and used his influence over republicans to kill it. He didn’t want the border problem solved because he wanted to continue to play on people’s fear and anger about the immigration crisis to help him get elected.

That’s Trump’s master strategy: fabricating a foil to fight against. He can only win by dividing us because he has no policies to unite us. He needs someone to blame, like baselessly calling Joe Biden a corrupt criminal. Or defaming all democrats as evil, godless communists.

He has no interest in uniting his fellow Americans: What he wants is absolute power. That’s why he looks up to his buddy Vladimir Putin, who has what he craves: unlimited dictatorial authority.

Rather than promoting policies to help working Americans, Trump chooses to inflame cultural differences to animate his base: fear-mongering immigrants as blood-thirsty killers and vilifying trans people, who comprise less than one percent of our population, as if they were the worst existential crisis we face.

Meanwhile, Trump ignores truly existential dangers like man-made climate change, which is already wreaking havoc all over the globe. Worse than merely ignoring it, Trump calls it a hoax despite indisputable evidence. A good example is the recent study showing that the 36 biggest fossil fuel companies create fully one-half of all the greenhouse gases that cause climate change.^⁠3

Why does Trump choose to deny irrefutable reality? A recent news story in the Washington Post illuminates this question, pointing out what matters most to Trump.

At a meeting of the top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club, Trump vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden's environmental policies while stopping new ones from being enacted. He had only one condition: “You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House.”^⁠4

Like everything else, Trump’s position on climate change is purely transactional. Nothing is based on substance or fact. His only goal – as the malignant narcissist he is – is to be the Grand Poobah^⁠5 of the world.

His takeover is happening as we speak, out in the open, right in front of our eyes.

Merely mouthing the words that we are a democracy is empty rhetoric. What makes democracy real is our government institutions, which are grounded in our Constitution’s system of checks and balances and staffed by dedicated public servants not beholden to either party.

It is true that Trump can’t abolish these institutions outright —only Congress can do that. Instead, he is attempting to mortally wound them by directing Musk to gut them so thoroughly that they will no longer serve any useful purpose.

Don’t be fooled: we are in the middle of a coup, bloodless so far. By wantonly destroying our hallowed institutions, Trump is destroying our democracy.

xxx

Footnotes:

¹https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-second-coming

²Ibid.

³https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/05/half-of-worlds-co2-emissions-come-from-36-fossil-fuel-firms-study-shows

⁴https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/

⁵Grand Poobah is a satirical term derived from the name of the haughty, prideful character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (1885).^[1

Why we need religion

2025-02-27T12:39:00.004-05:00

Facade of demolished church in Dover, NH (2017)

In this new age of extreme individualism, we are abandoning religion in order for each of us to pursue independent paths, locked in the iron grip of consumerism. This isn’t going to work because, as William Butler Yeats warned in his iconic poem The Second Coming, “the center can’t hold.”^⁠1

I’m going to make a surprising – and perhaps rash – argument for a person like me who doesn’t go to church: I believe that our root problem is the demise of religion as a vital institution in America.

While writing this piece, I encountered an unlikely ally in Russell Moore, Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today. In his book Losing our Religon, he has similar worries about the fate of his faith community as millions of younger Americans leave his church: “Can American Christianity survive?”^⁠2

Undeniably, our vibrant religious myths have withered way, opening up a dangerous void which, I fear, will be replaced by Yeat’s approaching ogre: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”^⁠3

As a former sociology graduate student, I am aware that religion has been an indispensable part of every human society in history. However—and this is the controversial part—I hope to demonstrate why every human in history has lived in a myth, not reality.

We can easily see this truth when accepting the strange myths that primitive tribes practice, but challenged to acknowledge that our current cultural myth is science and rationality. As the old saying goes, if you are a fish, you don’t know you are swimming in water.

If you are willing to accept my premise, at least for the sake of reading this essay, I want to explore alternative myths that might be capable of replacing religion’s former role. I have adapted some of these from Bernardo Kastrup’s book More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth, and Belief^⁠4 and the Academy of Ideas^⁠5.

Consumerism: Consumerism is an all-encompassing myth that overvalues the accumulation of wealth and material goods. People who are successful discover they are no happier and often more depressed than before; meanwhile, we are destroying our environment.

Nationalism: According to Kastrup, “Those who look at the world according to the statist myth view all social problems as requiring political solutions…. But the more people in a society that adhere to this myth, the closer society moves to totalitarianism.”^⁠6 A tragic consequence that is taking root in our country as we speak!.

Science and rationality. Kastrup suggests that one of the primary reasons that religious myths are being abandoned is because we have become “too literal, too rational, and too scientific.” Viewed through the prism of science, many of religion’s literal claims may look absurd, yet symbolize a greater transcendent truth.

Transcendental myth: We know when we are living a transcendental myth because it will resonate at the core of our being, changing a banal existence into one of genuine meaning. According to Kastrup, such a myth can anchor our experiences in a larger, more profound reality, “offering purpose and direction amid life’s inevitable challenges and suffering.

Transcendental myths can serve as a unifying bond in a culturally disparate country..

Carl Jung wrote, “The religious myth is one of man’s greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe.”

According to Kastrup, language is too limited to convey profound truths about human life and the universe. Religion goes beyond words to connect with what Jung called the unconscious mind, the arbiter of our primal needs.

In conclusion, if one examines a myth from the standpoint of cold rationality, Donald Trump’s transactional business model makes sense—but only to machines, robots, and ultra-rich people like Elon Musk. Meanwhile, it is an abomination to all of us regular folks whose highest duty is to honor our sacred bonds to family, friends, and community—not some sleazy transactional deal.

xxx

Photo Credit of church: CC Jean Stimmell

Footnotes:

¹https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-second-coming

²https:

//www.amazon.com/Losing-Our-Religion-Evangelical-America/dp/0593541782

³Ibid.

⁴Kastrup, Bernardo. More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief \

⁵

⁶Ibid

xxx

Holding on to hope

2025-02-27T12:33:00.000-05:00

“Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender,

A power you don’t have to throw away–

Rebecca Solnit^⁠1

Holding on to hope

“Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender,

A power you don’t have to throw away–

Rebecca Solnit^⁠1

How do I remain hopeful despite the travails of old age, mounting infirmity, and the ransacking of my country by the Attila the Hun of the 21^st century, along with his Machiavellian savant sidekick?

I think being old is a plus, a topic I explored in my recent column, “Meeting at the Edge.” M. Gessen suggests much the same thing in a recent NYT piece exploring how Ukrainian poets have kept the faith during their country’s agonizing three-year war with Russia:^⁠2

One of the oldest of these poets, Maria Galina, 66, has posted daily updates since the first day of the Russian invasion. She begins her dispatches with the hopeful salutation: “New day, new morning.”

Galina attempts to convince Gessen that she can envision a hopeful future because she used to write science fiction. However, Gessen contends that she can envision a hopeful future because she is a poet practicing “the art of intimations and intuitions,” which enables some writers to foresee what has not yet happened.

Gallina remains ever-hopeful, but don’t mistake her stance for optimism. As Rebecca Solnit points out – another supremely gifted wordsmith in her sixties – hope has nothing to do with optimism:

“Optimism says that everything will be fine no matter what, just as pessimism says that it will be dismal no matter what. Hope is a sense of the grand mystery of it all, the knowledge that we don’t know how it will turn out, that anything is possible.”^⁠3 And she is right.

Knowing that anything is possible fuels my hope. I agree with Buddhists who are aware that the future is fundamentally uncertain because life is constantly changing. It is inescapably true: None of us knows what will happen in the next second, let alone in the next year.

Nevertheless, we are in deep denial about how uncertain our lives are.

We have spent our whole human evolution doing the opposite: chasing absolute certainty that we are safe from danger. The impulse is understandable. Life used to be brutal, going to sleep at night terrified that a sabertooth tiger would eat us before morning. Ukrainians have similar fears that a Russian missile attack will blow them up in their sleep.

In those circumstances, psychologically speaking, it makes sense to yearn for a safe harbor free from mortal danger.

But for most of us in the U.S., we face no such peril. Yet that doesn’t stop politicians from creating such primal fear by scaring us with false existential threats: attempting to get us to vote for them to fix horrific situations that they concoct out of whole cloth. For instance, it’s pure propaganda that an army of illegal aliens is invading our country, intent on raping and killing us. It’s false, no matter how many times Trump repeats it.

In today’s world, our quest for certainty is so over the top it’s become pathological, limiting our horizons, creating irrational anxiety, and – worst of all – destroying our ability to have hope for the future. Here’s a famous quote that says it all, attributed to Erich Fromm, a wise psychologist and philosopher from the middle of the last century, whose work I adore:

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”

Among the few who understand uncertainty today are artists like the poet from Ukraine, who practice the arts of intimation and intuition. These creative individuals understand that uncertainty should be embraced, not feared. “They remind us that grappling with the unknown, navigating uncertainty, and embracing change can unlock our full potential and help us find deeper meaning in our lives.^⁠4”

We should all aspire to follow in the footsteps of the seasoned Ukrainian poet Maria Galina, who can never lose hope because every rotation of the earth is a “New day, new morning.”

xxx

¹https://www.amazon.com/Hope-Dark-Untold-Histories-Possibilities/dp/1608465764/?tag=braipick-20

²https:/www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/opinion/ukraine-war-poetry-poets.html

³https://www.guernicamag.com/rebecca-solnit-the-arc-of-justice-and-the-long-run/

⁴https://elevatesociety.com/the-quest-for-certainty-blocks/

Photo Credit CC Jean Stimmell

Why we need religion

2025-02-23T09:13:00.003-05:00

The facade is all that is left as church in Dover is demolished
CC Jean Stimmell: 2017

Undeniably, our vibrant religious myths have withered away, opening up a dangerous void which, I fear, will be replaced by Yeat’s approaching ogre: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”^⁠3

We can easily see this truth when accepting the strange myths that primitive tribes practice, but unable to acknowledge that our current cultural myth is science and rationality. As the old saying goes, if you are a fish, you don’t know you are swimming in water.

Transcendental myths can serve as a unifying bond in a culturally disparate country..

xxx

¹https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-second-coming

²https:

//www.amazon.com/Losing-Our-Religion-Evangelical-America/dp/0593541782

³Ibid.

⁴Kastrup, Bernardo. More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief (Function). Kindle Edition.

⁵https://theacademyofideas.substack.com/p/why-religious-myths-alleviate-existential?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=341427&post_id=156621912&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=ktp62&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

⁶Ibid

Meeting at the Edge

2025-02-15T21:58:00.003-05:00

“Most live as though life was something yet to come. But as John Lennon pointed out,

“Life is what happens while we are busy making other plans^⁠1”–Steven Levine

Remnant of ancient oak surrendering to Winter
CC Jean Stimmell

In an age when a relentless stream of catastrophic news threatens to engulf us, it is not uncommon for older individuals like myself to take solace in the belief that we are the fortunate ones destined to depart this world before the worst arrives. This sentiment reflects a cultural narrative that equates the inevitability of death with a diminishing concern for the events that shape our lives.

Fortunately, this notion is wrong.

Stephen Levine, the author of one of my favorite inspirational books, “A Gradual Awakening,”^⁠2 brought this cultural fiction to my attention. Contrary to the belief that old age diminishes our engagement with the world, Levine argues that being close to death paradoxically does the opposite: it heightens the significance of each moment we inhabit.

Levine’s Buddhist insights on the transient nature of life resonate with elderly persons like me because new ailments are piling up, repetitively reminding us our time is near. In my case, I have an assortment of afflictions, including three kinds of cancer. While none are life-threatening or terminal at this point, one will surely do me in.

Yet, in the face of that, a funny thing has happened.

Rather than tuning out—as I feign when making small talk with my friends—these increasingly stark reminders of my mortality are waking me up. They make me ever more passionately alive to the present, savoring everything, including a spat with a loved one, the expressive shadows on the virgin snow blocking my driveway, or the slapstick comedy acts that I regularly perform, prompted by my rickety body and sieve-like mind.

Levine suggests that this is nature’s way of preparing me for what’s to come: to “penetrate the illusion of solidity which potentiates the fear of death, the fear of dissolution upon the extinction of the physical body.^⁠3

He emphasizes that accepting my mortality can serve as a catalyst for surrendering to life’s fleeting nature. As I recently wrote in this space, we think we control our destiny, but in reality, our lives are a fluke, unfolding according to their own rhyme and rhythm.

As I learn to surrender to life, I find it an invitation to engage more authentically and fully with life – not less. But that wasn’t always so.

When I was young and macho, I considered surrendering worse than death: I pictured myself never standing down, like Davy Crockett fighting to the end at the Battle of the Alamo. The worst thing I’ve ever experienced was not in Vietnam but that one time I took LSD, a massive dose at that:

I totally lost grip on who I was or where I was. I felt myself flailing uncontrollably into an abyss, a bottomless void. I was beyond terrified. My friends told me I kept repeating this mantra as my only lifeline to reality: "I am insane...I am insane."

Now, in old age, I understand surrender better. But surrender does not mean shutting down, averting my eyes from the constant drumbeat of atrocities taking place around the world, like the thousands of children dying daily from bullets and famine.

Surrendering to what is beyond my control does not excuse me from bearing witness to the suffering all around me – and grieving it.

Margaret Renkl, the NYT columnist, asked the children’s author, Kate DiCamillo, how she “keeps letting herself be heartbroken without becoming broken forever.” She answered, “I fall into the mineshaft of despair over and over again,” but something always pulls her out: “a stranger who looks me in the eye and smiles, a grandparent who tells me about reading aloud to their grandchild…

DiCamillo concludes, “I’ve learned to let the beauty of the world and the bravery of other people pull me up and out of the despair.” I think that’s the key.

By surrendering to the present moment, we bear witness to the whole ball of wax: the traumatic moments as well as the awesome ones of beauty, bravery, and devotion.

To my way of thinking, that’s what it means to be fully human.

xxx

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

¹“Meeting at the Edge” by Steven Levine. 1984. This book is about the growth that occurs as we come to the mind’s edge.

²A Gradual Awakening by Stephen Levine. Anchor Books. New York: 1979.

³Ibid. Page 141.

I’ve become Rip Van Winkle

2025-02-08T09:08:00.001-05:00

The world has changed so much that I feel like I’m living on a different planet from the rural Yankee town where I grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s.

To gauge how the U.S. Has changed, I watched a documentary on PBS examining those exact years that featured Walt Disney, who was then building Disneyland to show “America's future.”^⁠1

In terms of predicting new inventions, Walt got a lot of things right: “Disneyland, made up of four "lands," opened in July 1955. One of the four, Tomorrowland, featured rocket rides "to the moon"; the Monsanto House of the Future, made entirely of plastic and displaying cutting-edge kitchen appliances; and a futuristic replica of Los Angeles' emerging freeway system. Tomorrowland was imbued with optimism for the future and confidence in American superiority.”^⁠2

Indeed, we accomplished most of those things: We rocketed to the moon but now find ourselves submerged in plastic and choked by highways, cloverleafs, and high-tech gadgets. Paradoxically, despite achieving the future we thought we wanted, we’ve lost our spunk and optimism: in fact, a majority of us now believe our country is heading in the wrong direction.

What the show missed were the cataclysmic changes that erupted between then and now, totally upending our societal norms and former way of life. Growing up in the early 1950s, I lived in radically different circumstances before the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Woodstock, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and all the other major historical shifts that transpired – all the way up to this week when we swore in our new president who spurns the constitution and pretends he is our king.

Thinking back on it now, I feel like a modern-day Rip Van Wrinkle who fell asleep in third grade and woke up nearly 80 years later living in this strange new land. The last thing I remember was sitting at my desk practicing cursive penmanship at my old Northwood Narrows school, which had two classrooms downstairs and a meeting room upstairs.

My only reference material was an old set of encyclopedias housed in the local library. The town contracted with a neighborhood farmer to transport us kids who lived on Jenness Pond to school in his old Jeep station wagon that smelled of hay and manure. We didn’t get our first TV until I was in the fourth grade.

Jenness Pond Road was dirt and often impassible during mud season. When that happened, we had to leave the family car half a mile away from home and walk in. During those times, our ancient neighbor, who we called Tib, would save time by cutting across the ice rather than taking the longer route by land. We were a little afraid of him, thinking he might have magical powers because he never fell through the crumbling, rotten ice and drowned.

After growing up in the sparse simplicity of rural New Hampshire, a significant chunk of what has happened since seems like a bad dream. While we had to practice ridiculous ‘duck and cover’ drills designed to protect us from an imminent Russian nuclear attack that never came, today, we are facing existential dangers on multiple fronts, many of them unimaginable in the 1950s.

The original Rip Van Wrinkle, written by Washington Irving, was a fable about how America was founded. I’m afraid that I am presiding over its unraveling – along with the Earth itself.

xxx

¹https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tupperware-future/

²Ibid.