jacks corner
Most people find it difficult to make positive changes in their lives—whether in terms of patterns of behavior, ways of thinking, or ways of acting and reaction. Again and again, we act against our own values and ideals, our own intentions and the promises we make to ourselves and others. We can describe this in terms of lack of resolve or will power, or talk about falling victim to old habits. But none of our talk gets us very far. We still don’t change.
A compelling logic seems to guarantee these failures. I am the one who needs to make the change. But I am also the one who needs to be changed. The ‘I’ who wants to change has to change before it can change, has to become a new ‘I’, because the old ‘I’ is the one ‘I’ want to change. But how can the old ‘I’ become a new ‘I? How can ‘I’ make that happen? We seem to be trapped going round in a circle.
Let’s start fresh. Instead of focusing on ‘me’ as the one that wants to change, let’s focus on time, since change is something that happens within time.
Change happens in this very moment. What can we say about this moment, about what’s ‘going on’ right now? Just this: the moment is not about ‘me’ or ‘I’. The moment is a whole, the whole of what is happenng now. Put differently, everything that’s ‘going on’ is going on together. For change to happen, that whole co-operating reality has to change.
Think of present reality as a system, in which every aspect of experience is integrated with every other aspect. Change happens within that system. We can’t force the change we are looking for if the system doesn’t support it.
Here’s where it get’s interesting. The ‘system’ that constitutes present experience is not a mechanism or device. It is more like a story: a story we inhabit, in the same way a character in a novel inhabits that novel. We are born into a story, we grow up into that story and make it our own, and we live out the story we have taken on. But even though we call that story ‘mine’, we are not the ones in control, any more than the main character of the novel controls the novel. If the story supports change (and sometimes it does), change follows. If the story does not support change, change will not happen. Whether ‘I’ change is not up to me! It depends on the story.
How can we change the story—not just the plot, but the whole world that the story tells us is real, the whole of what ‘going on together’? If I start from the idea that it’s ‘my’ story, I’m committed to it, and we are trapped in the same circle as always. But the story is not just ‘my’ story. Because everything in the story goes on together, the story is subtle, inconsistent, rich, and surprising. We are not the ones in charge.
Now, this is one source of the frustrations and negativities we often feel: the conflict between ‘what’s happening’ and how ‘I’ would like things to be. But suppose we could drop our commitment to ‘I’ and live the story as a whole. For instance, instead of seeing our own frustrations and negativities as reactions to the story, we could see them as part of the story. And the fact that they’re ‘my’ frustrations and negativity—that’s part of the story too.
The wish to change is also part of the story. Living the story means living that wish, ‘enlivening’ it so that it enlivens the whole of what’s happening. That is something we can do, a practice we can take on. We can cherish our own resolve to change, embrace and breathe life into it.
That is the starting point. But because everything is co-operating, going on together, we need to do more. We need to explore the intricacies of what is going on. We need to inquire creatively into the ongoing story we inhabit, seeing how it comes together. We need to discover the story in its widest and deepest dimensions. Beyond ‘my’ wishes and wants, frustrations and disappointments, alive to the whole of what’s going on, we discover the power to change. We do not change because ‘I’ want to, but because the story changes, because everything changes.
Here are some questions that can lead us deeper into the story:
o When we imagine change, we imagine a changed future. Can we also imagine a changed present and a changed past? Can we imagine these three dimensions of time as one?
o One way to change our behavior is to make rules about what we will and will not do. Sometimes that works; mostly it doesn’t. How do we react to self-imposed rules? What does our reaction teach us about the ‘story of me’?
o What are the time and space of our story? Can we change them?
o How do we share the reality of our story with the co-operating world? When I walk, does my world walk with me? When I see, does my seeing transform the seen world? When I meet a friend, or a stranger, what stories do we share? What ‘covenants’ do I make with the world? In the ongoing ‘story of me’, who and what come along for the ride?
o When I enact a gesture of change, what does it do to the story of the whole? What pressures arise to go along, to renew the covenant: what stories, emotions, or other reactions? When my plan to change fails, who or what breathes a sigh of relief?
o What is the relation between memory and story, between memory and intention? Can remembering my intention to change—giving it substance and body within the ongoing story—open a gateway into a new story, a changed world?
o Can I let go of the wish to change as mine? Can I let ‘my’ intention emerge as a guiding force within the story I inhabit? Instead of owning, can I appreciate?
The moment of change does not have to be mine. The moment is the story, and the story is the whole. When we understand this in a heartfelt way, a creative intention, born from a source at once familiar and unknown, moves outward. It transforms the whole, shaping as it goes. From the power of that dynamic comes the power to change.
August 30th, 2010
As children of scientific materialism and the Newtonian enlightenment, we are used to thinking of space and the universe as objectively real. But that is only a story we tell, a way of interpreting experience. It’s a good story for many purposes—putting satellites into orbit, making lunch appointments, driving cars, building computers, etc.—but it leaves out of account a large chunk of the world as we experience it.
Look at your own experience without presuppositions, and you will soon see that you do not inhabit a single, objective reality. Instead, in the existential reality of our lives as they unfold from day to day, we practice a kind of serial monogamy. One moment we are firmly bound to one particular reality; the next we commit ourselves to a completely different reality.
The easiest illustration of this point is dreams. We lie in bed, fall asleep, and fall into a dream: a fully articulated world. Something disturbs us, and we wake up for a few moments, then fall asleep again. This time we fall into a completely different dream, a whole new world. And each world in turn is real for us. We commit to it completely, like a man or woman taking marriage vows. Yet our vows prove fickle. The next dream is like entering a new relationship, bound by new commitments. It is in this sense that we are serial monogamists: faithful to one existential reality at a time, but inescapably moving from one such reality to the next.
As in dreams, so in our waking lives. Standing at the bathroom sink in the morning, brushing my teeth, I notice a strange taste in my mouth. But in the next moment, I am thinking of a phone call I will have to make once I get to work, and that becomes my reality. The feel of the toothbrush, the taste in mouth, my face in the mirror are all gone, or perhaps present in the most peripheral of ways. We live this way from one moment to the next, practicing the existential rule of serial monogamy, wholly committed to one reality, then wholly committed to the next, usually not even aware that we have made the switch.
Think what it’s like to drive a car. When we first learn to drive, the reality of guiding a huge machine through traffic at high speeds is all-consuming; nothing else is on or in our minds. But as we grow accustomed to driving, we stop noticing what we are doing, and our existential reality is once more up for grabs. Our senses may be attuned to the world of traffic and cars and traffic lights, monitoring for problems and dangers that might command our attention in the next moment. But that sense-reality is not the existential reality we inhabit. Instead, our minds wander. We think of last night’s movie, talk to the person sitting next to us, or marvel at the greed of the persons whose crimes are featured on the radio news.
Perhaps this split between the existential world we inhabit and physical reality is not quite this extreme. We might speak instead of a kind of subliminal awareness of the world we are speeding through in our car, in the same way the serial monogamist might find herself casually attracted to someone she sees on the street. Still, the basic pattern holds. One moment we are ‘here’; the next moment we are ‘there’, and the break between here and there is close to absolute.
Enter the cell phone. Soon after cell phones became available for use in cars, it became clear that speaking on the cell phone while driving was a significant risk factor in accidents. Roughly speaking, to drive while holding a phone conversation was equivalent to driving while drunk. In both cases, accidents followed at an alarming rate. After a few years many jurisdictions began passing laws that prohibited driving while holding a cell phone, on the theory that one-handed driving, combined with the basic problem of distraction, was the source of the danger that cell phones posed.
This way of dealing with the problem, however, has not worked. People who carry on hands-free phone conversations while they drive are still about as likely to have accidents as drunk drivers.
Then perhaps it is the problem of distraction? But in itself, distraction cannot be the issue, for the reasons already suggested. Many drivers, perhaps most drivers, speed around on our city streets in a state of almost constant distraction, letting habit and a kind of readiness-to-respond substitute for conscious experience, their minds wandering furiously.
Here is where it helps to reflect on the existential rule of serial monogamy. When we talk with someone on the cell phone, we are no longer monogamous. Instead, we are trying to live in two worlds—two realities—at once. We are in the car, attuned in a non-conscious way to the physical realities of car and road and traffic; but we are also in a conversation with another. Present with that other (for that is what happens in a phone conversation), we engage a wholly different existential reality. And we cannot do it. We cannot be in two worlds at once, any more than the drunk, his body responding to the chemicals coursing through it, can walk a straight line. We have become adulterers, in the most literal sense, adulterating one reality with another. It doesn’t work.
Notice that this is completely different from holding an animated conversation with the person sitting in the passenger’s seat next to us. Our traveling companion inhabits the same reality we do (at least for present purposes), and therefore takes a role within that reality. A news broadcast or song we hear on the car radio also has its place in the monogamous universe to which we commit ourselves. But the person at the other end of the telephone conversation is (existentially speaking) somewhere else. She inhabits a different reality, and we try to share that reality. That is the source of the cell phone dilemma.
Perhaps we will learn in time to treat phone conversations differently, without the same level of existential engagement, though this of course would lead to a breakdown of certain communication possibilities. Indeed, we do already treat them differently: a different level of existential engagement for the business phone call, the phone call with a friend, or the occasional phone call that is truly charged with meaning and significance. After, for a phone call that really matters, would you keep driving as you spoke? Or would you pull off the road, so that you could give yourself fully to what was being said, returning at least for that moment to the serial monogamy that governs most of our waking and dreaming lives?
June 28th, 2010
The most dangerous form of arrogance is the arrogance we take for granted, the arrogance that colors our understanding so completely that we do not even see it as arrogance.
In our culture, such all-pervasive, self-evident arrogance often involves the unthinking way in which we privilege science as the highest form of knowledge. A case in point is the ongoing interest in SETI, the “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”
The idea behind SETI projects is that there may be other intelligent forms of life in the universe, possibly more advanced than we are, reaching out to contact us through electromagnetic transmissions. On the face of it, this suggests a certain humility about our own accomplishments. But look a little closer and a different picture emerges.
How are SETI projects supposed to make contact with other intelligent life forms? By initiating a conversation in the language we accept as universal—the language of science. The SETI project assumes that more advanced extraterrestrial civilizations will use electromagnetic transmissions (radio, etc.) to communicate. In other words, they will develop the same scientific knowledge that characterizes the modern world, and then take it further. Not only that, but they will have the same drive to reach out to other civilizations in other parts of the physical universe that inspires efforts like SETI.
Does any of this make sense? In the history of the human race, ours is the only civilization to have made science into the highest form of knowledge. Why assume that other life forms will have developed in precisely that one direction? What about the other dimensions of human experience? Couldn’t there be civilizations out there that are more advanced in their social interaction, or in their relation to the world they inhabit? What about life forms that are spiritually more advanced? Why suppose that a more advanced civilization will be advanced along precisely the scale that we consider the most important? Just here is the kind of arrogance I am thinking of.
The counter to this argument is that if we want to contact extraterrestrial life, we have no choice but to use the means we have available. But this begs the question. There may be ways to communicate with other intelligences that have nothing to do with exchanging ‘information’ about the physical structures of the universe. A mid-twentieth century science-fiction writer named Clifford D. Simak once wrote a novel called City in which a central premise is that dogs naturally possess the ability to move easily from one universe to the next (which explains why they are constantly howling at things we cannot see or sense). In our search for life among distant galaxies, have we have been barking up the wrong tree? Perhaps we should be looking for more advanced forms of life in hidden dimensions of this world we inhabit here and now.
Modern history is sometimes described as the progressive dethroning of human beings from their place at the center of the universe: first with Copernicus, then with Darwin, then Freud, etc. But human beings are more stubborn in their arrogance than this picture suggests. We reconfigure the stories we tell, constructing dramas in which we are the central actors. Somehow, in the end, it’s all still about us.
If we’re satisfied with the status quo, this hidden arrogance needn’t bother us. But if we suspect that in this day and age things are not necessarily headed in a good direction, we’re going to have get a lot more radical about what counts as valuable knowledge.
June 2nd, 2010
It is time to start this blog site moving again, after a long absence.
I have used the term “stepping out” in the title of this post, because it came up in a discussion with a friend. We need to be willing to put ourselves forward, to inhabit our lives fully, and this means making ourselves visible to others. Hence this post.
Years ago I heard a piece on the radio (This Amercian Life) in which the presenter suggested people could be divided into two groups by asking them this question: “If you could only have one magical power, and you had to choose between flying and being invisible, which would you choose?”
For me, being invisible is a clear winner. But it’s time to challenge that.
Jack
July 5th, 2009
People get very excited about lucid dreaming, but there is a simpler kind of lucidity I think it would be nice to cultivate (or manifest) in dreams.
In our waking lives, there are certain questions that deeply interest us. Some of them may have to do with looking at our experience in certain ways. For instance, right now I am involved with a TSK Online program, and in that program we are constantly being invited to explore our experience in various unexpected ways. Or in another dimension of my life, I have been looking at how emotions throw us off balance.
Now, when I dream, I almost never, that I can recall, ask myself similar questions during the dream. Is this because I am less myself? Because I have another set of concerns? Would there be a way to make this an active practice?
Here is an example that may be just a bit too cute. Buddhist teachings often suggest the value of looking at your life as though it were a dream. What if you looked at your dream as a dream, not because you knew it was a dream (that’s lucid dreaming), but because you simply carried your daytime practice over into your dreams? Of course, to do that, you would have to be doing the practice pretty actively during the day.
Jack
November 18th, 2006
I have always felt that I do my best thinking while I am writing. First comes the initial insight (and perhaps this is the best part of the thought, in one sense, but read on). Then, when it comes time to write that insight down, I discover that the insight is something more like an outsight, in the sense that when I try to frame it in words, I realize that in order to do so, something about my previous set of assumptions, my previous world, has to change. I have to go outside/beyond where I am when I start the writing process. And suddenly I find myself off and running, in an unexpected direction, in fact, a direction that I didn’t even know existed.
Does anyone else experience it like this?
October 27th, 2006
The quote above is from a radio show I heard this evening, driving home, and it’s from a neurologist who points out that sound does in fact arise from air waves touching the small bones of the ear, and eventually being translated into electrical current; according to current research, electrical currents that are rhythmic produce pleasant sensations, while those that are chaotic make us uncomfortable.
More at the level of meaning, the same neurologist noticed that when parents who have been holding their babies put them down, they tend to immediately start talking to them, using verbal melodies that for certain basic messages (“Good baby!” “Watch out!”) are universal across cultures. The implication was that sound can actually be a substitute for touch, or put differently, that sound is a form of touching.
I happen to be working with sound as a sense modality in some teaching I’m doing at the Nyingma Institute, so this was all quite interesting to me. I won’t go into details; let me just say that we do ourselves a disservice if we think we know what it is like to sense something. Our senses seem to be much more malleable than we imagine. And this is something to explore not only in specific exercises (TSK exercises, meditation practices, etc.), but in our walking-around daily activities.
October 11th, 2006
The United States government has revised its rules for allowing liquids on board airplanes: You can now bring on board 3 oz. plastic bottles, as long as they fit in a quart-sized sealable plastic pouch.
The emphasis on numbers and metrics shows that a certain kind of knowledge is in operation. Screening agents are not asked to exercise any expertise or insight; they simply take out their rulers and scales (not that this happens in practice, in my limited experience). Roughly the same reasoning applies to screening hand luggage: the idea is that every piece of luggage is screened, not just luggage attached to someone who arouses the suspicions of the security personnel.
There is also another kind of knowledge at work. Security personnel are trained to note suspicious behaviors (agitation, sweatiness, and so on). This checklist approach, however, is still meant to be mechanical: in theory a robot could apply it also.
Finally, there is a more intuitive kind of knowing. “Why did you shadow that woman?” the supervisor asks the officer on the beat. “I just had a hunch,” is the answer.
There are good reasons for choosing the more mechanistic approach. Hunches can easily cover over prejudices. But the point I want to make is that when we choose the mechanical approach, we are actually choosing against knowledge. We are acting on our doubt that someone can be impartial without being forced to be so through the mechanical application of rules.
The same holds true whenever we rely on rules, which choose the general over the particular, the manual over the situation “on the ground.” The democrat, wrote Plato, treats equal and unequal alike, which is a pretty good definition of what rules are all about. In our system of government, we say proudly that “justice is blind.” But we should also be acknowledging that blindness reduces the knowledge available to us.
Jack
September 30th, 2006
It’s a new moon, and the Jewish New Year, so it seems an auspicious occasion to get this little vehicle up and running and out on the road.
My idea in carving out a corner of the website for my own musings was to open up an informal gateway to creative inquiry. I write myself a lot of notes anyway, so it should be easy enough to share some of them.
For now, I will try focusing my entries on current events, or comments on the culture, more or less on the model of blogs. I’ll save more substantive comments for the discussion pages. I don’t expect to post every day, just when I have something to say.
I had a few observations saved up, but looking at them now, none of them seem interesting enough to include. So substance will have to wait a while.
Anyway, welcome to my corner of this virtual world.
September 28th, 2006
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