This Is What I Believe

The past couple of weeks I've been sick. And I don't mean the garden variety sniffle or two. I mean the kind of sick where you shiver with cold and misery; where, even though you may have plenty of help and human love surrounding you, you feel distant from it all, forced into retreat. The fever makes you say strange things. The aching in your muscles keeps you up at night. And when some semblance of equilibrium is finally regained, and you find yourself out and about, engaged in your normal routine, you can't help feeling somewhat shaken. After all you've been informed, yes freshly informed that the vessel of your body is not unsinkable. Your mind is not unshakeable. Your happiness is under no warranty. You are mortal, vulnerable, prone to loss. These are of course good facts to know. But they are not easy ones to digest.

Being sick though, comes with its gifts as well. For one thing, the process of recuperation deeply changes your relationship to time, so that, if your relationship with that mysterious entity is usually one of animosity and struggle, well you can give that up right now, because there's no way back to health but to accept time as an ally and friend and to let it pass over you like the waves of the surf or like the notes of a chant. You see, all of that activity and motion that normally places you in opposition to time and in rebellion against the limits of time—I mean the shopping and the bank errands, the driving here and there, the business meetings, the busy ins and outs of your professional life—you have to give this all up, along with the can-do attitude and the bravado of control. You are no longer the “manager” of your time. Time is no longer yours to control. It is no resource of yours. It is its own master and always has been. You must give yourself up to time. Your assignment is to lie back under the blanket and be. It is to give yourself up to the taskless task of recuperation, the laborless labor of healing.

And what I'm saying is that the general experience of lying back and letting the office be an office without you, letting the dirty laundry stay dirty laundry and the cooking stay uncooked—all this has the power to connect us once again with the basic rhythms of the world. And here I mean the sort of world we knew in childhood, in which everything seemed to come with a mysterious signature of its own, which maybe you could not decipher directly or comprehend completely, but which you knew had meaning. Lying there in bed (quietly, receptively, as you did in childhood perhaps waiting for sleep) you hear the traffic outdoors and it communicates something to you. No longer is it faceless and random. Instead it feels like a presence in its own right, full of expressive thought; that stray flick of gravel thrown from the tire says something definite and true, equal absolutely to itself. Or as you watch the sunlight slanting in through the picture window, noting how it changes its slant slowly from hour to hour, somehow the slow fact of its motion fills you with gratefulness and with the simple two words “how beautiful.” 

Other transformations unfold themselves, like angels of Van Eyck opening their peacock-rainbow wings. When I was ten years old, and sick with pneumonia, convalescing in an old house (in a town without birches called Birch Run) my mother's houseplants gained character and charisma and presence and soul as I sat with them hour after hour trying to breath: I remember the Hindu rope, complexly knotted with leaves a marbled green and white. And the Christmas cactus, saying "It's December again," in the language of curly shrimp-like flowers. The philodendron that climbed any stick. The rubber plant that bled an immaculate white latex when cut—all these together arranged themselves into a sort of living choir of contemplation, whose song consisted of the modulations of silence—a silence comparable to the one I have savored over the course of my illness here at Sunnyside in the company of my own plant collection: my delicate ivies, my bushy quartet of Norfolk pines, a gnarled jade that used to belong to my mother, and all the rest I love. 

It is the great mental tragedy of our wasteful and consumptive times that we take nothing seriously unless we can place it outside ourselves, and doll it up as a metaphysical stranger to us; a not-me that we can comfortably measure with a stick and with properly placed numbers. This mulish reductionism, this tragedy of apartness from the inner truth of things, this puniness of heart, this obsession with surfaces, this insistence on the enoughness of the artificial, this scorn of the imagination, this neurotic turning of our backs on our own inner life, this perpetual epistemology of doubt, this distrust of the competence of the human mind (even a child's!) to place itself in the universe accurately, and to assess the meaning of its life in relationship with that universe: all this is tragic in the deepest sense. For it is was and is preventable. 

It is time once again for us all to say, along with Hamlet, that great saint of the Universal-Inward: “Here I am! I am not nothing! I am a mind! I am a will! I am a perceiving soul! A powerful angel of awareness! A stubborn barnacle of thought upon the heaving ship of the infinite!” I am sick of people estimating their minds too low. I am tired of people enslaving themselves to convictions that an intelligent dog would not believe, namely that we have no will, that we are machines, that Consciousness itself—the Thing without which there would in fact be nothing—is, of all things, an illusion! An accidental illusory squirt. A poor and dismissible ghost in the neural machine. These convictions are, in fact, not only questionable, but very unlikely to be true. They are violently extreme. They certainly do not conform to common sense, and the metaphysics on which they are based is perplexed with self-contradictions. 

And yet again, these pronouncements and estimations of the non-existence of our thoughts are treated as self-evident axioms by people who ought to know better than not to doubt their axioms. Furthermore anyone who does dare to doubt them is dismissed as a throwback to a mathematical Frenchman who sited the soul in the pituitary gland. I am frankly sick of this. I am sick of investigators who never examine their metaphysics. Sick of researchers in neurology and biology who have never considered the perfectly obvious possibility that consciousness might be a primary phenomenon like Time or Space; after all, some of the best physicists (nearly a century ago now!) led by the redoubtable Neils Bohr considered consciousness in the informative act of observation to be the best explanation for how so many interesting and perplexing things happen in the world of the very small. How so much information seems to gets around. 

You may think I am getting off my original subject. I assure you I am not. I am on the subject of sickness and health. And here is what I wonder: I wonder if we may need to lie down as a civilization in order to see again, as I needed to lie down in my sickness in order to wake up once again to the speech of the world. I wonder whether our rationalist reductionist materialist take on the world is so far off of the accurate balance that it might be possible to say that we are insane and that our civilization is insane. And again there is no fix but to lie down and "see feelingly" toward a new vision of ourselves and our relationship with the earth.

I think all this is very possible. 

Consider after all what our civilization produces. We base our economy on consumption, and so very thoroughly does the practice of consumption rule our world that it can be said that the two most plentiful products of our civilization are waste heat and garbage. That is what we make. Overwhelmingly! Waste heat and garbage! And a poisoned, wasted earth is the outward sign of our “progress” in this endeavor. And in our work of consumption, who are our most intimate and powerful allies but our machines? Our combustion engines and refrigerators, our conveyor belts and lasers, our computers programmed to speculate and sell in order to fan the flames of consumption. 

And tell me, dear Reader: is there no connection, none, between how we have thought of ourselves these past two or three centuries of the industrial age, and what we and our machines have made of our world? No connection between the destruction we have wrought with our machines upon the earth, and our insistence that we ourselves are machines, and that the earth we inhabit is a machine? A stranger-machine at that, an enemy machine, a competitor that we must master and overwhelm? 

And is it not possible to say that, in this regard, we are insane? 

Surely it's time to dismantle this metaphor. Time to lie down and think of other metaphors until the machine-mind evaporates away. Time to look inward to consider a world choked with the beauty of inwardness. With texts that can be read inwardly by us. And read with joy and reverence and sympathy and love.

We are living beings. As is the earth. As is the magical universe itself, that has given rise to us, its children. We are not simply piles of separable parts keeping time. Furthermore our minds are capable of intent. And our intentions culminate and find their most burning accurate center in acts of tenderness, imagination, and love. We can give freely of ourselves! Without reference to the machine! We can speak the word "love," and know what it means and know what it costs, and then not just say it, but make it happen—love. We can dare to say “beauty is what I inwardly see, and infinity too, in the green context of my home the earth, where the fishes swim and the birds take to the air joyously and fly, and nothing can take the reality of beauty from me, nor the infinity of the inward: no not all the reductionist fantasies of “here you are, we've got you, we've pinned you down, little mechanical-computational human being, and you are nothing really, nothing that cannot be explained, or at the least explained away.” 

Again, in the words of William Blake the poet and engraver, “We become what we behold.” Thus if we see ourselves as nothing more than computational machinery, and measure everything around us as machinery, we will inevitably become like machinery ourselves: Thoughtless. Inwardly impoverished. Incapable of change or mindful attention, and above all, less given to the practice of love. And in hewing to this vision we will destroy ourselves. There is no question about this. All we need do is look around us and see what that vision of the machine has, over the past three centuries, wrought upon our home the earth. To continue in this path is true insanity. A deep sickness from which we must all awake!

It is a curious and almost inexplicable habit of human beings to enslave themselves to their own metaphors, until they forget they ever made them up, and therefore have the power to change them. But! If we change our metaphors, we change our minds; we behold something new. 

So. What will our new metaphor be? Shall we be living beings again with souls? Gardeners of the earth? Guardians of the planet? Crafters of beauty? Lovers of the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, able to speak to them all? Well then! That will not be the end of it, for the world that we inhabit will change as well. And the beauty and the scale of that change will be extraordinary. It will be a beauty, the likes of which we cannot at present even conceive. 

This is what I believe.

HB

Next Post Friday, January 9!

Less Is More Than We Think

We get used to everything; nothing stays entirely fresh. Not even natural beauty. Not even surplus. I've lived in places that could make your jaw drop, they were so beautiful. But then, after living there awhile, I found there was really no way to recover that initial awe, that first sharp print on the paper of the brain. I might have wanted to recover it, but I couldn't.

Or consider the written word. In information-soaked cultures like ours, a book (the actual item) is nothing special; it's a bagatelle to get your hands on one, a big so-what to own one. But in many parts of Africa, where access to the Internet is still a luxury, and where even books are rare enough, Anna Karenina might be something you'd literally hunger and thirst for, a story you'd walk miles through the dust and the heat to hold and to read. There's a marvelous address by Doris Lessing on this precise subject: a speech she gave on the occasion of receiving the Nobel prize. It is available here. 

It's probably an important adaptation--this ability to take things for granted, to allow certain overwhelming aspects of reality to depreciate in value in the economy of consciousness. We may like to picture ourselves living in a bliss of total consciousness, glowing diligently as angels with appreciation and gratitude, but I'm not so sure that in such a state, we'd get the laundry done. And the laundry does need doing!

Of course, as Lessing's address reminds us (with such beautiful cognitive intensity) the contrary premise is also true: that in the face of dearth or of a withering of supply, we tend to appreciate more whatever it is that's running short on us! We feel deeper gratitude for what we have less of.

• If you want to appreciate the beauty of your home, go camping for a week.
• If you want to increase your appreciation of travel, stay at home for a year.
• If you want to appreciate just what a privilege it is to have a car, ride on public transport for a month. 

There are a thousand variations on this theme. Consider living one of them out, and not just for the sake of your philosophical health, but for the sake of the planet too; for the sake of the re-balancing of the cosmic economy. 

Over and over again over the past several months on this blog, I've said that, if we want really to help the situation we're in (as a voracious species on a limited blue-green sphere), then many of us are just going to have to make do with less. I return to this theme so often because, after a great deal of reading and consideration of these questions, I've come to believe that it's the only strategy that offers any hope of success. To say it bluntly to myself: there is just no way that several billion people can live the lifestyle that I, for the last thirty-five years or so, have led; the ecology, as we know it, could not survive. So, for the sake of the planet, and for the sake of justice, I must change. I must change my life.

I suppose it goes without saying that most of us (including me) would like to avoid drawing such conclusions. Substantial lifestyle-change demands so much of us that, right away, by instinct, we're full of defensive questions: can't we just take the conventional cars and replace them with hybrids or electrics? Can't we just replace the coal-fired power plants with thousands of windmills? What about high speed rail, powered by solar? Such questions imply the hope that a greener world might be engineered without involving any pain for us, or any substantial loss at all in terms of living standard.

Unfortunately change without personal sacrifice is unlikely to improve the situation much. Consider the hybrid car. Yes once it's on the road, it consumes less carbon. Unfortunately, so much carbon is sunk into manufacturing a hybrid (the lithium batteries being the budget buster) that, before one of them can claim any credit against its conventional cousins (for saving any carbon at all) it has to be driven nearly 75,000 miles. There are similar limitations to almost every advance that the sustainability-tech movement has claimed or championed. Usually what we call green, is in reality only a little less brown, with a little camouflage of wishfulness included.

An even more serious problem, though, with the strategy of change-around-the-edges is this: what we save by means of efficiency in one area usually simply frees up more money for consumption elsewhere in our lives. So, say I've saved money on gas this year because I own a hybrid; well, I take that money I've saved and apply it to a new television set that I don't really need, or I replace the roof and the siding sooner than we would have otherwise. Since this alternate-vector consumption comes with its own environmental costs, it turns out that owning the hybrid serves no green purpose at all. There's a book on this subject. It's called The Conundrum, by David Owen, and it packs a lot of proof into a very small space.

I wish none of this were true, I really do. Life for us earth lovers would be a good deal less frustrating if we could just trust all this trouble to work itself out: trust the oceans to stay full of fish and the atmosphere to clear itself of carbon: trust the planet to supply us with fresh water and petroleum right on into the indefinite, ever-progressing future. But folks, it ain't gonna happen. Things are the way they are, and the system we live in is limited, not by the lack of human imagination or by a sudden down-sizing of good-old-fashioned Yankee optimism, but by the laws of thermodynamics and of mathematics, of geology and of resource distribution. We can't go on like this. We can't. What we need is a reconditioning of the human mind. And that, to say it again, begins with the acceptance that we just have to make do with less.

This can be depressing. But there's a hero to this story as well, a sort of knight that rides to our rescue: the realization that "less is more than we think." 

• What really matters to us, is what value our consciousness puts on a thing.
• Human consciousness tends to value precisely what is rare, what is limited in supply.
• Therefore, when faced with limitations and diminishings, we can deal with the change, because....
• Even as the supply decreases, the value of what remains to us goes up.
• We're proportionally happy with the remainder that we keep.

As a final thought, consider the ultimate resource contraction: consider what happens when we run short of time: I mean time with a capital T. The sensation of mortality. There are, after all, people who  know their time on earth is short: Older people, sicker people, and just plain wise people who have thought about mortality a lot. Now, many, many such people report that, in the face of the knowledge of the ultimate limitation, they savor every day all the more. Mind you, it's not that they wouldn't like to live in better health, or wouldn't like to be given a little more time, or even a lot more time to live! It's just that, now that they know and have accepted the truth (that their days really are numbered) they nevertheless deal with it, and find that somehow, remarkably, their flame of life burns brightly enough in spite of that knowledge, and yes sometimes even more brightly because of that knowledge. That flame seems to burn on a fuel of paradox and deliberate gratitude!

HB

Until Tuesday the 5th!

Twelve Crooked Steps to Fuller Consciousness

Improvement makes straight roads, 
but crooked roads are roads of genius.

W. Blake

1. For a few minutes sit beneath a tree. Remember that its roots reach down into the darkness every bit as far beneath you as its branches reach upward toward the light.
2. Consider your own more metaphysical roots: the means by which you grasp the nourishment of the intangible necessities of life (beauty, friendship, the certainty that you are loved and are worth loving). How do we come by these intangibles; how are they filtered, assimilated, perceived? 
3. Talk for a time with a friend, and talk long enough so that the conversation at some point comes to a contented lull. (It is one of the supreme proofs of a friendship--the moment when you realize that even silence feeds it). Now, within that moment of silence, think of the roots of the tree. 
4. And at least for this moment refrain from picturing yourself as a separate body; after all, you extend with your friend into the silent spaces of mutual comprehension in the same way that trees reach their roots (mutually tangling) into the earth. You overlap with other lives everywhere. Why should the body always be considered the primary phenomenon? What is the body anyway? "Matter," we say. Which is? Sets of probability-points in calculation. Energy in motion. An above-ground happening merely.
5. Find something beautiful and hand-made and take a few moments to admire it. Consider the fact that the object itself is a secondary phenomenon--just as driftwood is a secondary phenomenon of the willow that produced the branch, or just as the ripples on a pond are a secondary phenomenon of the duck taking flight. But what is the primary here, as you look at the object before you? I say consciousness itself--the maker's and yours, the admirer's. 
6. Imagine (or if you like, pretend) that the objects around you in your home all have an inner life: the jackknife smiles at a relevant pear, the hourglass whispers going going gone, and the jade plant is slowly, sorrowfully forgetting its childhood Mandarin. Indeed now that you think about it everything around you--every object--seems to leak with mystery like the radioactive water from the tanks at Fukushima. 
7. What you are experiencing is powerful and dangerous. It is the fire that fuels the cypresses of Van Gogh. It is Jehovah speaking to Moses from the burning bush. It is the unutterable archangel clothed in your neurology a billion years in the developing that holds in its metaphorical right hand Time and in its metaphorical left hand Space, and brings them together continually to form the critical mass of subjective experience. Boom. Blaze. Now transcendence. Now possession. Now the poetry of a fuller life, if we would only see. Don't laugh. Believe. So much in regard to humanity's survival is riding on how well we manage to entertain ourselves without burning up the obvious, material stuff; the oil, the trees, our enemies, ourselves. Yet we love the sensation of risk. So let's be firebugs of the metaphysical, like Moses and Van Gogh.
8. Reflect on the fact that what we directly see is merely the present arrangement of an infinite pattern forever receding into itself. Behind and within the duck-in-flight is a duck swimming on the lake moments before. Behind and within the gray driftwood branch is a willow branch once green and flexible. Behind and within the young man headed off to college on a train is maybe a little boy delightfully voicing the letters on his alphabet blocks.
9. Consider a nine-volt battery cell, and the many ways in which its power can be converted into something that might almost be described as a skill. For instance in the context of a smoke detector, the power of the nine-volt can sniff out burning toast. Or in the context of a weather radio, the nine volts of a nine-volt can deliver the weather forecast.
10. Consider the human systems that we humans have created: the nation state, the global economy, our schools and our many venues of work. Into what, by means of the algorithmic gears of these systems, is the power of our human consciousness converted? Whose benefit do these conversions serve?
11. Think over your daily routine. Ask yourself: is this a vibrant and purposeful routine--one that (say) like the hydrologic cycle, beautifully, perpetually, feeds itself? Or as a total sum of striving does it seem more purposeless and empty--a mouse forced with shocks to remain on a treadmill, or a car spinning its wheels in deepening snow? 
12. How much needs changing? Where must that change begin?

Until Saturday the 5th!

HB