Push the Button

Reality can be very forgiving: We can go for years, even lifetimes believing something that isn’t true simply because our belief never gets tested against Reality. Much of what we believe is inconsequential–until that day when it matters a lot whether we have it right or not. Because when it comes down to it, Reality doesn’t care what anyone believes.

 “It’s not what I don’t know that gets me in trouble, it’s what I know that just ain’t so.”

I believe that was said by Will Rogers. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t matter unless I put money on it, or a life. 

Of course, Reality does test our beliefs sometimes subtly, and the only clue we have that we’ve been tested is when our answer to whatever the question is, doesn’t work. We assemble the intellectual Rube Goldberg device made of logics and reasonings, of evidences and bits of the puzzle we have collected, of things people we trust have told us, of what 10 million Frenchman swear is true! We polish it up, set it on the floor or the stage or a pedestal, then we push the button, and our construction makes a funny noise and falls over.

Frustration is the result of a failed Reality Test. Disappointment comes from unrealistic expectations, based on mistaken beliefs. At which point, you can sulk and go to bed, or go find some entertainment to take your mind off the failure–or you can take your machine apart, you can examine the pieces, take another deeper look at the logics and examine the reasonings, and make some changes until you believe you have it right.

Then, push the button again, and see what happens.

Seeing Through Ancient Eyes

We look at things so superficially, so at-the-moment, so very materially: Western society has forgotten there are other ways to see. But these ways require us to slow down, to see the world without all we have built and paved and altered. I recently watched two documentaries that are like taking a deep breath of truly fresh, clean air with all the scents of nature, after being cooped up for most of our lives in stale, dead airs. 

The first one, FIRST FOOTPRINTS: THE ORIGINAL PIONEERS OF ALL HUMANKIND, is about how the first modern humans arrived in Australia some 40,000 years ago: how they lived, and lived well in what to us appears the harshest of environments; how they passed on knowledge of the land’s Law generation to generation, and how the people today who are their direct descendants still remember, still know the Law, and live it. Through paintings and carvings 10,000 years old, and more, the history of these original inhabitants is remembered, still owned, still NOW: The descendants as they walk in sacred places speak aloud to the Old Ones who are, they say, still right there. They speak to them, tell them of the current moment, “Hello, it’s Margaret… I grew up here but I left for a while and now I have come back. These people with me are coming to see you, and then they will go home.” It isn’t mere ritual, it is real, it is present and alive. They are visiting family when they go to these places.

The second is called SEASONS. It is French, subtitled in English, but there is very little spoken as the stunningly lovely film reminds us what the world of Europe was like following the last Ice Age: a Golden Age of the forest.

Over 10,000 years, humankind imposed itself on this world, yet we are still intimately part of it, if only we pause, think back, and remember.

Both these programs remind us what we have lost touch with, but what is still there, can still be reconnected with, if only we have the will and awareness to do it. Both these programs inspire the will to remember, and to reach out and find it again. We have forgotten, we have ceased to see so much in our busy, clever, technical lives!

More or Less

To those who have much, more will be given. Those who have little will lose what little they have.

This New Testament assertion perturbs the part of me that naturally inclines to lift up the underdog, to demand balance and fairness. It is intuitively wrong, socially irresponsible! It seems very unlike other messages of Jesus that promise the Earth to the meek and the poor, that teach that the man of wealth will have a harder time finding his way to salvation than the humble man. 

But maybe it isn’t about that kind of thing. Maybe it isn’t about matters of body and society at all. Maybe it isn’t about fairness or any intent of reward or punishment.

Maybe it is about education. It is about the energies of curiosity, exploring, learning, growing in knowledge and wisdom. It is about the open mind, the consciousness that is willing to expand. That means being able to let go of cherished thoughts and beliefs, opening to new ones, better ones. It means being able to accept having been wrong, maybe even that we are always likely at least some wrong. 

Imagine swinging through the rings of a jungle-gym: you can only succeed in getting from one end to the other by letting go, reaching and grasping, and letting go again… Imagine there is no end to this jungle-gym, that it goes on infinitely, inviting us to never-ending discovery. 

To those who have much, more will be given. Those who have little will lose what little they have.

This is a truth that interfaces with our physical living, but it applies to spirit more than to body. While Body seeks survival, security, comfort, and reproduction, Spirit wants to soar, to be unlimited by things like gravity and entropy and all the physical laws that surround living things. Spirit disregards time and distances, it transports as instantly as ideas happen.

Bodies evolve slowly, life ascending from the very tiniest, the very simplest, to the more and more complex, the more able to understand and manipulate the world. Every life today stands on the figurative shoulders of billions of years of the experiences and lessons learned by the organisms that came before.

Spirit itself also evolves as consciousness expands experience by experience, realization by realization, lesson by lesson learned.  

I got to thinking about this while watching this series, ONE STRANGE ROCK. The episodes are presented by a number of astronauts who have seen the Earth from a rare perspective. I got to thinking about what kind of people are astronauts. 

 They can’t be slow, they can’t be ignorant, they can’t be bound by the limitations of mental processing or shy from emotional baggage. Which isn’t to say they don’t have these things, only that they are able to transcend them. As both human and being, they must be among the most highly evolved bodies and spirits among us.

That’s where I made the connection with that biblical assertion. It isn’t a promise or a threat, it is just the way it is: knowledge builds on knowledge, and is a foundation for further knowledge. Understanding allows for greater understandings. Curiosity and openness–the basis of all spiritual growth.

Looking Back in 2008

I think the initial turn-around started in the 1950s and 60s, with the generation of post-war parents who, coming from a heritage of privation in the war years, and the Great Depression, delighted in giving abundantly to their kids, proud and happy not to have to deny them anything!  In the 50s there was more stuff, new stuff like television, new technologies that seemed wondrous–and there was the money to buy it!

Clothing didn’t have to be worn until it fell apart, and more was store-bought than ever before–because we could!

Dr. Spock changed attitudes and approaches to child-rearing.  James Dean glamourized adolescent angst. Alan Ginsberg threw a whole new attitude into the poetic undercurrent of life.  Gender values were thrown totally askew from the traditional assumptions: things that had long been kept politely secret began to leak, creep, and leap out of the shadows to confront society with their existence–and the terrible question of their actual rightness or wrongness.  The Pill followed changes in attitudes about sexual behavior, and greatly reduced one of greatest of forces towards self-restraint, for women, at least. The evolving of study and understanding of the human psyche changed attitudes about mental illness and disorder: recrimination was replaced with compassion and no one was merely crazy anymore; therapy and medication replaced the darkness of cellars and cells where the deranged could mutter and scream away their lives without bothering the neighbors.  As well, a whole new world of excuses for unacceptable behavior sprang up: “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived…” and a whole new bag of excuses for excusing responsibility.

Meanwhile, with a swell of patriotic fervor on the part of citizens who had lately returned from offering up their lives for the sake of their country’s policies, and no longer taking for granted the blessings of a free society, Jane and Joe Public began to get personally involved in government issues.  The established government itself, because of the sudden and vast improvements in the speed of information and communication, came under greater and more immediate scrutiny: dissent was on the rise as a political art-form, and our elected officials had less and and less to hide behind, less time to let a decision have its real effect before it was seen and judged by popular opinion. 

Technology bounded towards the era of the Jetsons; affluence leaped upwards for many Americans, Hollywood became fiercer than ever, pouring escapist and indulgent glamours over the landscape; Big Business was as busy in its own interests as ever, but the Individual was thinking more and more of his/her own significance-as were women, blacks, adolescents, and every other minority in the nation–and they/we were mobilizing!

The glamour of selfishness brightened: Looking out for Number One!

For reasons social, political and personal, not to mention economic, more and more households had two working parents: the kids more than ever were raised by teachers, television and each other.

Since the 50s, the Golden Rule had been in eclipse, and as the next generation of babies came along, their parents failed to teach this most basic and universal of social contracts, because they themselves had not learned it.  Oh, it may have been stated, but it was not being demonstrated.

I do not suggest that change is bad: it is inevitable, and necessary to any growing organism.  What I am suggesting is that several very important babies got tossed with the clean-up water.  We need to go out and find them, nurture them, and return them to society.

Self-indulgence carries a high price-tag.  Always.  Sometimes we are willing to pay for an evening’s partying with the next day’s recovery.  We are willing to pay the extra thousands of dollars for the cool car, the new technology.  But we have to draw lines for ourselves, and realize what we will not pay.  We can’t just say Gimmee Now without a regard for the price, or for when it will have to be paid, or by whom.

We who inherited the burdens of our current society from the short-sightedness, the ignorance, the simply mistaken assumptions and beliefs of our parents, and their parents–What are we creating now, to bequeath to our children, and theirs?
___________________________________

I wrote that essay 10 years ago: We are a decade further into seeing the answer to that last question. Do you think we’re doing better?

Having Faith

My dad, a scientist, once told me, “I don’t need faith, I’ve got knowledge!” I think it was a response to my asking him to have a little faith in me. It was, however, his scientist-mindset all around. He had great respect for the scientific method, for things known, and for things not yet known, at least in the natural world.

Scientists seek knowledge, or as close as they can get to something they can claim as ‘knowing.’ At the same time, true scientists know they never know enough to say more than, “It looks like this is true with the information we have and the tests we can make.” Real science is always ready to accept its own ignorance, and to question what is ‘known.’ Many things have been challenged and tested enough that they are accepted as facts, though scientists still use the word ‘theory’ when labeling them.

It is a different use of the word than the layman’s concept of ‘theory’ as meaning ‘unproven.’ Hence a lot of the confusion over the Theory of Evolution. So far, no one has been able to present real evidence that evolution is not a fundamental dynamic of life’s functioning. Arguments, sure, and alternate hypotheses–which is the correct scientific term for unproven theories–but nothing that stands up to Reality’s tests.

In fact, my dad didn’t have as much knowledge, or even sufficient knowledge of me, either, as he asserted. Sure, he knew about things I didn’t know, had experiences of life I had not had, but he had not had my experiences, and truth be told, I knew even then a few things he didn’t. In any case, that day he was being clever, not smart, not kind; his intent was not truth, but shutting me down.

People who deride faith are often doing the same thing.

But the truth is, as much as we can actually know very little, and not absolutely in this complex universe, with our limited human minds, none of us live without faith in something. It may not be in a Supreme Being or an eternal soul, or in weather forecasting; it may be faith in absurdities already disproven by science, like Piltdown Man, or the Flat Earth that in fact turn out to be false. It may be faith in things proven by science, or in information from a trusted source.

I have faith in the essential goodness of human nature, though every day, every minute, someone in this world is doing their level best to prove me wrong.

I have faith that there is something greater than myself–greater than human beings–all, with supreme awareness, though how I define ‘God’ is not at all what most people mean by ‘God.’ My faith in God’s existence is not faith in any religion or dogma but in my own experience and reasoning.

I have faith that many things not now provable or even detectable by science will, someday, be detected and tested and proven and explained by science.

“Because God Wants It That Way” is not a statement of faith, it’s a cop-out that settles a matter without any kind of evidence, reasoning, or logic. It’s a conversation-stopper. It is psychic earplugs.

Every time we say, “I believe…” we make a statement of faith. Since practically everything we claim to know is actually belief, that makes us all people of faith.

Mystic Whispers: Medusa

O maid, you once were lovely,
full of grace, and named 
for Wisdom in eternal female form–
Metis, Maat, Medha the names you bore…

But the passing generations, 
reshaping and restructuring the norm,
made you over as a thing to fear,
no longer Maid, but monstrous 
with a deadly, stony gaze;

Men made you cruel and cold
and perilous to life in latter days,
forgetting that the peril in your eyes
is Truth too true for them to see, and live.

Grim-faced now, the Gorgon who is wise,
whose serpents in her hands once offered Life, 
now writhe in ringlets on her brow
And Perseus pursues her with a knife…

CL Redding 2005

The Virtue of Conflict

I was just watching a documentary about the first civilizations that states that for 99% of humanity’s time on Earth, we were hunter/gatherers, pretty much doing the same things for the whole time.

Then we began to settle down with our patches of grain, and herding animals instead of just following them. We discovered metallurgy… Squabbles became better-armed and graduated from fisticuffs to raids to wars… Conquest for control of resources–food and materials, work force, mates–led to the military/industrial complex, centralized governments, and organized religion, all with the need of offices and special places to interact with everyone else, like temples, training grounds, waiting rooms with counters… And everyone needed places to live that weren’t too great a commute to the jobs in those places. So, cities.

According to this documentary (FIRST CIVILIZATIONS, from PBS), management of large areas of land and large groups of people, control of all the resources in those large areas, led to a kind of security for those living within the pale. In that security, that peace, there was the possibility of evolving cultural ideas and skills: fundamentals of civilization.

As each centralized conquest grew and expanded its influence to surrounding communities, a couple of things planted the seeds of its ultimate downfall: Envy of other growing communities with conquest on their agenda; Complacence on the part of the too-long secure, the comfortable. So, inevitably some outsiders, energetic and hungry, break the peace and the comfort, and over-run the complacent.

Each power comes, through chaos, to enforce its own peace, and it is again, in those times of peace that culture has the time and space to grow. Each one, in its time, becomes comfortable and complacent, living on assumptions of permanence… And so it goes, a spiral of increasing complexity and problem-solving, as the very complexities and solutions engender and become the problems…

I suppose this model of progress/chaos/growth/chaos applies not only to whole societies, but also to each individual as we advance through our lives. “Chaos” is struggle, from the time previous solutions break down into problems, to the time we settle on a new solution that settles those problems, allows us to rest. But if we rest in place, if we don’t move ahead or keep our solutions evolving to resolve the problems that grow out of previous solutions… If we don’t keep paying attention, sooner or later, something snaps, and an adjustment forces itself on us. 

Earthquakes are a good metaphor.

Lament For Home


When the night goes dark, 
all glowing wild eyes dimmed and dead;
When the forest goes silent 
of song and cry and roar
and there is only the creaking
of trees moved by the rush of wind;

When flowers no longer hum
with the dancing bee;
When the sky is empty of wings
that glitter and crackle
or softly beat the air;
When water is wild and foul
no longer home to any living thing,
and dry dust bakes unsheltered
from the sightless sun;

When the heart of humanity
is broken with loneliness and shame, 
in a world of only whispers
in the accusing wind,
we will know the truth
that some will still deny:

We had the warnings,
We had the time–
We could have done so many things…


CL Redding July 2015

“Aren’t you kind of old to be so cynical?”

I look at some of the young people around today and they are a lot less bullshit-inclined or fooled than other generations have been: Less trusting of authority, more spin-proof. While this might look like cynicism sometimes, it may also closely resemble common sense.

Cynicism is a result of disappointed trust combined with a sense of powerlessness. It is a refuge of adolescents who are saying, essentially You can abuse me and I can’t stop you, but this doesn’t mean I don’t see what you’re up to, don’t despise you for it. 

It isn’t a matter of age, but of attitude. The young tend to be idealists and optimists, adolescents become pessimistic cynics, and maturity brings us around to a realistic acceptance of the world as it is: people as they are, ourselves, too, as we are. But we all know those who grow more bitter as their years advance, who never come to that place of acceptance of the world as it is, and of how no one has the power to fix everything, or the responsibility.  

To fix what we can, of course, not to simply walk away from everything disappointing or unfulfilled. But to stop feeling guilt over our times and places of powerlessness is part of wisdom.

For my part, old as I am, I love what the kids are doing, how they are taking action and speaking out, how they are demanding that we who have the power use it with more conscience and common sense, more decency. They are afire with healing anger, their determination is fueled with intention and hope, and they give me hope. I can hardly wait until they all vote!

Today’s rising generation is not taking refuge in cynicism: They are telling the world, You may abuse me, but I am not powerless, and I am going to change things!

Lessons from binge-watching AMAZING RACE

Tonality sinks more ships than flapping lips, and triggers more reactive explosions than the thing said.

History, geography, and basic manners are neglected studies these days.

Judging people by superficials–their accents, background, nationality, religion, physical attractiveness, or skin tone–is always going to be mistaken.

When there are no rules, sometimes people still choose to play fair.

Travel agents sometimes make mistakes: Best deals you find yourself on the Internet.

White-, American-, Age-, Religious Belief-Privilege are obnoxious throughout the world.

Sometimes bickering is annoying to listen to, but is how a relationship works. 

People become pessimistic to fend off the anticipated ravages of disappointment.

Emotional abuse takes many forms, some more passive than others, but still mean-spirited and destructive.

The most common exclamation on the Amazing Race is a toss-up between,”You got this, Babe!” and “This is ridiculous!” A close runner up, usually in a whining tone: “This is so haaard!”

People often mispronounce things, which can be funny, but the funniest so far was the gal in Africa who pointed out a troupe of bamboons. 

Sometimes mean people win.