‘us’ at work (photo by nancy white)

In recent years, this rambling blog has had two main focuses: (1) Trying to better understand how the world really works (and why as a result ‘saving’ our civilization culture from collapse and saving the world from the sixth great extinction of life is impossible), and (2) trying to better understand the essential nature of humans (and specifically and in that context, the essential nature of one human, the author).

The first focus has allowed me to move past denial that we are inevitably headed into a very difficult few decades that will leave the way our species lives utterly changed, and greatly reduced in numbers. And it’s enabled me to appreciate that we should give up trying to reform/change our culture and our behaviour and instead learn to become more resilient as individuals and as communities, to be prepared for cascading crises and the eventual collapse of civilization in the decades to come. As a result, this blog has shifted from being a prescription for making a better world to a chronicling of civilization’s tragic but unavoidable collapse.

The second focus has allowed me to appreciate that, despite the disaster our species has wreaked on the planet and the massive suffering and horror we continue to inflict on each other and other living creatures, we have done this out of ignorance and fear and trauma, not out of malice. We are, I have come to believe, a fatally flawed species, not an evil one. An evolutionary misstep, this development of a brain too large and powerful for our own and our planet’s good. Our brain has, out of its extraordinarily expanded capacity for invention, violence and fear, deluded us into believing it is us, and disconnected us from our a-part-hood with our true selves and with all life on earth, with ghastly consequences.

In order to understand my own trauma, fear, anger, grief, detachment and disconnection, I have been studying the processes that make me ‘me’, examining my life for clues on how to be less fearful, how to reconnect, how to be present and more useful to the world. Socrates first postulated “An unexamined life is not worth living”. Few people would choose to disagree (and those who might probably have never heard of Socrates). And there is great joy and solace in learning.

But now I am not so sure Socrates was right. All this self-examination has led me to self-dissatisfaction (notably with how much of my life I wasted doing what I was told and thought was the right way to live, and how incapable I seem to be to let go of the world inside my head and simply be, here, present, in the moment). I’ve concluded that my ‘purpose’ for living is to play, to just be, to enjoy and share the incredible beauty and the astonishing ride that is life on this planet. But I ‘knew’ that when I was just five years old. A half-century of self-examination and work has brought me back to the same knowledge and beliefs I had when I didn’t think about things, just accepted what was. And now I appreciate this, what else is there to ‘self-examine’?

The first inkling that my self-analysis was a fruitless undertaking arose when I realized we cannot be other than who we really are. Our attempts at “self-improvement” and “self-actualization”, I have come to appreciate, can only lead to disappointment and self-approbation, and are useless. Still, I thought, surely there is benefit in self-knowledge, in knowing who we really are, at least so that we can get rid of all the ‘not-us’ stuff our culture has layered on us and become, once again, truly ourselves?

So I know, now (at least I think I do) that I am a complicity of my body’s cells and organs, not an ‘I’ at all but a ‘we’. ‘Our’ mind, which I used to think was me, is just an evolved feature-detection system for this complicity, enabling ‘us’ to protect ‘our’selves from danger, find food and other resources for ‘our’ well-being, and move the mostly-water-filled bag that contains ‘us’ around when that’s advantageous for ‘our’ survival. And much of the contents of this bag is bacteria and other autonomous creatures, each with its own DNA and sense of ‘self’, creatures that are so much a part of ‘us’ that without them ‘we’ would quickly ail and perish. And all of the contents of this complicity are transient, coming and going regularly, to be replaced with new components that once were part of other creatures, or other planets.

And I know, now (at least I think I do) that our culture, with the best of intentions to look after the well-being of the whole group of human-shaped complicities on the planet, has attempted (with considerable success) to occupy my (‘our’) feature-detection system with concepts that are completely unreal, and in so doing to compel me (‘us’) to behave in ways that are often in conflict with what my complicity is trying to compel me (‘us’) to do, with traumatic and dysfunctional results. So I am (‘we’ are) trying to take back my (‘our’) body/self and be who I (‘we’) really am/are/was before being colonized by human civilization culture. And that’s really hard to do.

But what does this knowledge and self-knowledge get me (‘us’)? In a recent review of John Gray’s new (not yet released) book The Silence of Animals (more about that in future articles) John says “To adopt happiness as a goal actually makes people less adventurous. Far better just to try to live your life in an interesting and fulfilling way. Looking for your true self invites unending disappointment.” He argues that we don’t need, and don’t benefit from, a ‘purpose’ in life, and would be better off trusting our instincts of the moment to do what seems interesting and worthwhile. The title of the book refers, according to one reviewer, to the wisdom of looking at the world silently as an animal does, not with a mind towards how it might be better, but rather as it most wonderfully is. This, importantly, does not at all preclude the use of the imagination, but rather the focusing of the imagination on the fullness of what really is.

How does one do this, saddled with a human mind restless to think about the past, the future, the possible, anything except the here and now? As one of the book’s reviewers, Philip Hensher notes, the book presents a paradox: “to suggest that a human being could develop the kind of animal, present-tense registering mind of silence that John explores may or may not be possible…. Is it not another suggestion of how the mind of man might be improved?”

Perhaps the key to presence is not meditative practice or mental discipline, but just a willingness to pay attention, to wrap oneself (one’s selves?) up in what our senses and imagination can perceive of what is and what is happening outside, all around us, now. Or as the old 1960s motivational poster put it “Stand still and look until you really see”. With the eyes of a falcon, or a five-year-old child.

(And now for something completely different. This article is a bit of a flight of fancy, since looking at photos can encourage such strange imaginings. It may come across as pat or angry but it’s not intended that way — it’s meant to be provocative, to get me (and you, if you’re so inclined) thinking in a different way about what we see, and what it means. Please don’t take my meanderings below too seriously — I’m just trying out some new ideas out loud. — Dave)

Take a look at these early colour photos, taken in the US between 1939-43:

Take a look at the whole series, not just the one I’ve sampled above. Take your time. Look at each photo. What is it telling you?

Take a look, too, at these early colour photos, taken in Paris between 1909-30.

And at these early colour photos, taken in Russia between 1909-12. Hard to believe they were all taken in the same country (then the Russian Empire), isn’t it?

Although the following photos have been colorized from high-quality black and white shots, they’re also worth a look. Here’s a photo of the Bowery in New York in 1905, by colorist Scott R at Shorpy’s vintage photo site; see the full-size version here if you want to look at the facial expressions:

Here’s a version of a photo of flood victims lined up for assistance in 1937 in front of an ironic billboard, by the amazing Swedish colorist Sanna Dullaway for Time magazine from this collection:

The reaction of a lot of people looking at these photos (based on the comments on several of these photosets’ websites) is: (1) life was much harder back then; things are much better now; and (2) people sure have changed since those days (for better or worse, depending on the commenter).

My reaction was the opposite. The median real annual income of a working person today is not significantly different from what it was at any time in the 20th century when these photos were taken. That’s using real inflation numbers, not the falsified ones published by self-interested governments. That’s medians, not averages skewed by the incomes of the ultra-rich. And that’s per worker, not per household (cost of living requires two incomes in most households today to provide the same purchasing power than one income provided in the first half of the 20th century). The median real net worth of a household today (again, in real-inflation-adjusted dollars) is not significantly different from what it was at any time in the 20th century — that is, nearly zero (most families have debts approximating the value of their assets, when those assets values are discounted by the bubble factors affecting most real estate and stock and bond investments today). And many households are “under water” i.e. they have a negative real net worth.

The women working for the defense industry in the first set of photos above (just about the only industry there was in war-time, end-of-depression-era years) are there because their husbands and fathers are fighting overseas; they will be immediately laid off as soon as the war is over.

So why do they look so poor? One reason: the banks had not yet decided to ratchet up the consumer economy by making credit available to everyone, and, working with the corporate sector and media, propagandizing the population to believe that having two or five times the assets, along with two or five times the debts, somehow represented an “improvement” in their lives, and that if they didn’t acquire all the assets their credit limit would allow, they would be considered economic “failures” by their superficially-”richer” neighbours and peers.

Where has this superficial “wealth” come from? From using cheap energy and cheap foreign (and domestic, non-unionized, minimum-wage-or-less) labour to exhaust the planet’s resources to make billions of shoddy, throw-away products (keep ‘em buying more). From indebting workers their whole lives so they will stay in thrall to the corporatist employers that exploit them, and then passing those debts on to their survivors. From using up, in a couple of generations, cheap (when costs are externalized) natural assets the planet took hundreds of millennia to produce, and hence depriving future generations of enough resources for them to live on, while saddling those future generations with mountains of garbage, toxic wastes and trillions of dollars in debts that can never be repaid without impossible, perpetual growth — debts that will come due and collapse the economy beyond recognition. From stealing land and resources from the commons, the people, for exploitation by a tiny minority of rich corporatists. From stealing the land and resources of third world nations and then saddling those nations with phoney, inflated “debts” and inflicting misery and deprivation on their people to punish them for the avarice and greed of corrupt “leaders” once sponsored and supported by the colonial corporatists in return for giving away that land and resources.

In other words, the current “wealth” is a fiction. If you were to take the photos in the sets above and photoshop them by putting obscenely expensive jewelry and clothing on all the people, replacing the cars and wagons with limousines and private airplanes, and “painting” the walls of all the buildings with marble and tapestries, you would get only a slightly exaggerated comparison with what today’s photographs, with our debt-laden buildings, vehicles and clothing, and our resource-exhausting, ecosystem-destroying and climate-destroying “wealth”, present. And for this, two people per household put in longer hours with less work “security” than past generations (some studies have suggested that for more than half of today’s “affluent nation” families, they would be bankrupt in 60 days or less if, due to some adversity, one family member suddenly lost their income).

What if we were to do the opposite, and “photoshop” today’s photographs to eliminate all the “wealth” that hasn’t been paid for and for which there is no reasonable expectation that it ever can be repaid? And to eliminate all the “wealth” that came from stealing from future generations, third-world nations and a million times our share of nature’s resources? My answer? Pretty much this: Seven billion naked, starving, clueless people scrounging through garbage and exhausted soil for clean water and their next meal. That’s the real story our modern photos tell.

So much for things being better now.

Have people really changed in the last 100 years? Some of the commenters on the sites where these photos were published write with either nostalgia (that life was simpler and people better-behaved then) or self-satisfaction (that life provides far more freedoms now).

That’s not what I see in these old photos, or the faces in them. What I see is conformity, resignation and mindless obedience to the beliefs and standards of behaviour and appearance of the day. For these people, regardless of their place (country of residence or social situation), there is just one correct way to live. The costumes are different but uniform in each picture. So is the behaviour, and, implicit in the exhibitions of patriotism, of work, of posture and action and dress, so are the beliefs. I look at these faces and recall what my parents believed, and my grandparents, and, from my research and my grandparents’ stories, what their parents and grandparents before them believed. They all believed what they were told, by their parents, by their “leaders”, by their bosses, by the politicians and media and, most of all, by their peers and friends and spouses. Their actions were in accordance with these beliefs. Non-conformity and rebellion and disobedience were tolerated in youth, in moderation, with the knowledge that the relentless and combined effect of the homogeneous culture would soon grind down such misbehaviour and recalcitrance and remake every individual into, as EE Cummings put it, “everybody else”. Not just like everybody else. Into everybody else.

But that’s changed, right? Look at today’s photos and you see a vast divergence and high tolerance for and displays of diversity of appearance, beliefs and behaviours? No?

No. Go ahead, look at the photos in your newspaper, your yearbook, Flickr, or Facebook, or the iconic photos in the magazine racks. What do you notice about these photos? They’re all the same. Just like a century ago, we’re all brainwashed, from birth, to dress, think and act like everybody else. To be everybody else.

There is one significant difference between the photos of a century ago and those of today. A century ago the homogeneity was within each culture. And there were lots of somewhat different cultures then. Today there is only one culture, and it’s global. It is eating up the remaining cultures and the last vestiges of diversity of dress, of thought, and of action, just as it’s eating up the resources of the planet, at a dizzying pace. Everyone is becoming, more and more, everybody else. It’s a corporatist’s wet dream.

That’s what I see, in these photos of the past, and the present. Perhaps I’m seeing something most others are not. Or perhaps I’m missing what they’re seeing. Or what they want to believe they’re seeing.

Every photo is a story, and as soon as it’s taken, it’s a story of the past. It’s a fiction. It’s only a story, though it’s our story, or so we tell ourselves. It’s only sensible that we want to capture it, recall it, tell it again. How much harm can there be in that?

For the last few weeks I’ve been practicing learning to be “present” using a combination of methods from Adyashanti, Eckart Tolle, Richard Moss and Gabor Maté (more about him in a later post). I have yet to be “awakened to my true natural state”, but I feel closer to that than I ever have before, and am really enjoying the journey. Here’s a summary of what I’ve been doing.

Rather than just focusing on meditation, Adyashanti combines it with an “inquiry and contemplation” practice. They work together like this (indents are from my study notes, with my paraphrasing, vetted by my friend Paul Heft, who’s also studying his work):

Three Core Practices are used together, to enable “awakening to your true self”:

1. Meditation|Being Still: Dropping resistance to the present moment, and relaxing into the silence of being and awareness; realizing that your mind and its egoic consciousness is only a part of you, reliquishing its control over you, and realizing you are a connected part of everything.
2. Inquiry: Questioning who/what we are (the answer is not a noun/thing and can’t be put into words) and what is real, from that still state, discarding the ego’s intellectual preconceptions and emotions (you are not your thoughts or your feelings or your mind), and going deeper and questioning everything (is it true/real? that is meaningful/important to you).
3. Contemplation: Holding a phrase/idea/question in your awareness openly and non-analytically until meaning emerges, e.g. contemplate why what we do and what we think we want to do are different; this is a “letting come” process less intellectual than inquiry.

Understanding the following 4 Principles of Practice can help you in the above activities:

• Suffering is a function and result of our identifying with our personal and collective egoic consciousness.
• Ego is a fiction created by circular patterns of addictive thinking based on the idea of the separate self.
• Freedom from ego comes from awakening to your true nature as “conscious spirit”, a kind of ineffable (can’t be explained in language) presence; the meditative still state is our natural state of being.
• Conscious spirit (unlike the ego’s values that are based in separation) universally and inherently values truthfulness, unity (which is something more than just ‘connectedness’), freedom, peace, love, gratitude and appreciation.

The following 4 Orienting Ideas can guide you to what you’re looking to achieve in your practice:

1. Awakening to “being”: alive, intuitive, relaxed awareness in unity that can only be understood through experience; just like balancing (on a bicycle etc.) you can’t figure it out in your head or teach it, you can only practice it until you start to be competent, and “get” it, this natural state of being.
2. Giving up the “false self”: letting go of all the things you think and/or feel about yourself, which can then allow us to free ourselves from and realize this self as “not us” when we begin to awaken to being.
3. Recognizing the “dream state” for what it is, which is not reality: ridding ourselves of the personal and collective worldview we create with the false self, the unreality in which most of us normally live.
4. Finding what works for you: This process is largely a matter of overcoming our resistance to (and fear of) just perceiving what is. It’s understandable to fear this because what’s left is like an empty space; surrender is frightening, but the fear and the assumptions of what you’re afraid of are just part of the dream state. You just have to keep trying things, through meditation and inquiry and contemplation, until you find something that works, until you realize that you (we all) have the innate capacity to free ourselves, to awaken to being and give up the false self and its dream state.

There are also 5 Prerequisites of self-knowledge and self-discipline; you should be able to answer these 5 questions knowingly and affirmatively, both before you begin and as you create your practice:

1. What is important to you here and now?: Being aware of your aspirations and values, both in your thoughts and as manifested by your actions.
2. Are you willing to follow through?: Being aware of and willing to do/not do what is necessary to move toward your practice’s aspirations, every moment, not just during your practices.
3. Can you accept responsibility and authority for your own process?: It’s not the teacher’s role to provide the learning and to pursue the practice; it’s yours. Most of the work is solo and self-directed and unique to you.
4. Can you be honest with yourself without judgement?: Can you bring sufficient self-knowledge, self-awareness and self-management to your practice that you are not ‘at war with your mind’ (this is tough)!
5. Will you give each moment of your life authentic attention?: without avoidance, denial, or magical thinking.

And finally there are three Purposes or Attainments for these practices, which practitioners tend to pursue sequentially as their practice ‘deepens’:

1. To reduce personal suffering.
2. To know the truth about yourself and the world: to follow your passion, beyond mere intellectual curiosity and emotional longing, to learn and know what really is.
3. To surrender the self, which occurs in several stages: First, giving up the ‘lower self’, the ego/will, without ceding or surrendering it to another’s (teacher’s) ego/will. Then, achieving a fundamental shift of identity and the realization of the unity of everything (while avoiding the temptation to allow the ego to re-establish itself as a self-aggrandizing ‘enlightened’ or ‘spiritual’ self). And finally, allowing the falling away of the ‘higher self’, including all one’s experiences and spirituality, all aspects of self-referential being.

This is pretty heavy stuff, to be sure, but I find it more pragmatic and empowering, and better articulated than a lot of more rigid, dogmatic and “master/student” approaches. It respects that we all learn and discover differently. I also like that it embraces the idea from Eckart Tolle that much of our lives is spent inside our heads helplessly retreading the ‘stories’ that the egoic mind tells us (of four types, as Richard Moss delineates: stories about the past, about the future, about ourselves, and about others/the ‘outside’ world), and these stories invoke ‘pain-body’ emotions (regret and shame and nostalgia about the past, dread or unreasonable hope for the future, shame and sadness about ourselves, anger and grief about others and the state of the world etc.). The vicious cycle of intellectualized stories and debilitating emotions combine to possess us, so we can no longer see what’s real.

What’s wrong with us, or our minds, that so many of us live in this debilitated, unreal state, not present, alive, now, in the moment? My sense is that our brains have grown too large and complex for our own good.

The mind evolved, according to a theory espoused by Stewart and Cohen, as a ‘feature detection’ system, for the collective benefit of our body’s constituent cells and organs, the ‘creature’ that is us; the ability to recognize and react to different ‘features’ of the ‘real’ world was evolutionarily selected for. But this evolution had an unintended consequence: eventually this feature detection system began to confuse its representation of these ‘features’ (figments of reality) with reality (akin to confusing a map with the territory) and began to confuse its ‘self” (the feature detection system) with the constituent cells and organs (the creature) it evolved to serve, ‘believing’ that this ‘self’ was real. Stewart and Cohen (in Figments of Reality) explain it this way:

Our minds lead a dual existence… It is a duality of interpretations, just as a map can be a sheet of paper but represent a world. Features of the outside world are converted, via our senses, into ‘figments’ in our brains. On one level (brain) these are ordinary real-world processes involving chemicals, electrons, whatever; but simultaneously on another level (mind) they are mental maps of a very different order of reality, [representations of] tigers and cows and people’s faces. This kind of two-level feedback… provides a key to the curious ‘dual’ nature of brain/mind. For example, why does the real world seem so vivid? Why does red look so utterly different from green – and yet why do we find it impossible to imagine a colour that is different from the standard repertoire? Why is touch so sensual, why is pain so immediate, impossible to ignore, and just plain nasty?

On the ‘figment’ level our brains do not perceive the universe in a passive manner; instead, they project the inner world of figments back on to (our conception of) the outer world of reality, so that our private inner world appears to us – but not to anybody else – to be ‘out there’. (What others perceive ‘out there’ is their own back-projection of their mental figments. However, on the whole different observers agree on what is projected, because it all stems from that common external reality, and is produced by similar brains, trained by similar Make-a-Human Kits [cultures].) Our brains, in this sense, create their own realities – and this enables them to attach vivid labels to prosaic reality, labels that are vivid because they are inside our minds where our personal identities also reside; but also labels that have evolved to be vivid because we survive much better if they are… Labels and associations that originally exist in the external world can, over time, be replaced by internal feedback loops in the mind which mimic the external loop sufficiently closely to have survival value. So our inner world of vivid figments must match the external realities well; for if it did not then we might easily imagine a tiger to be a rock, and try to sit on it, an action that would not be conducive to survival. It is evolution that binds the brain/mind strange loop together so that it evolves as a whole, ensuring that what mind chooses to perceive is usefully related to what is really there. And mind ‘decorates’ the important sensory messages with qualia like ‘red’, ‘bang!’ and ‘ouch!’

This leads to a delightful paradox. Perceived reality (as opposed to real reality) seems vivid to our perceptions, not because it is real, but because it is virtual. ‘Red’ is a vivid construct of our minds, which we plaster over our perceptions by projecting them back into the outside world. There is an objective sense in which the outside world is red too – it reflects light of an appropriate wavelength. But that is a different kind of ‘redness’ altogether, with none of the vividness that our minds use for ‘red’ decoration of London buses and blood. It’s just light bouncing around. Indeed ‘wavelength red’ does not correlate perfectly with ‘sensual red’: our colour vision is buffered against severe variations in observing conditions, such as changes in light intensity created by shadows or bright sunlight… The bee’s virtual world is different from our virtual world, and while they both are rooted in the same objective reality, they are different interpretations of it…

Smell… and taste… are perhaps more obvious cases where our vivid sensual impression has no direct external match: we smell ‘bacon’ but the real world just produces molecules; the response they excite has much more to do with our sensory apparatus than with any natural feature of the molecules… Most adult humans are ‘smell-blind’ along at least one dimension of smell-space. So our personal experiences of smell, and yours, are very probably different – an interesting case where we can do experiments on ‘what it is like to be’ somebody else. If you really want proof that the world of our senses is a figment of reality, go to the nearest amusement arcade and put on a Virtual Reality headset. The crude, blocky computer-generated images that these gadgets present to the eye ‘possess’ – that is give our minds a vivid impression of – the same solidity as the more refined images of reality that our eyes present to our brains. Yet here the actual external reality is quite different: a pair of tiny TV screens carrying images that have been tailored specifically to create the illusion of depth. The three-dimensional world that they appear to depict exists only as a mathematical map in the computer’s memory. Despite this, they have depth, presence … they look real. This is because ‘red’ is the ‘decorated’ picture that the brain cooks up when the eye is stimulated by light of certain wavelengths: our decorated version of reality is virtual.

So really, everything that our mind conceives and perceives is ‘unreal’ — it is a simplified, culturally-influenced model or representation, a ‘story’ about reality, that is not ‘true’ at all. Reality just is; it exists outside of our minds and is something utterly different from the ‘figments of reality’ our minds (for cultural and evolutionary reasons) invent, or are persuaded are ‘real’ by our culture. (I confess that’s a phenomenological argument, and one, I should caution, I’m no longer particularly interested in debating.)

This has led me to believe that most creatures spend most of their lives in the moment, completely present. They are at once relaxed and aware. On rare occasions, a situation arises that causes adrenaline to flow, and provokes a fight/flight response. The response is largely instinctive, but, in many creatures, the experience is processed by the mind to inform future responses. Then these creatures return to their normal ‘now time’ state. I’m not so sure that this is equally true for domesticated creatures that have grown up under the influence of modern human culture; the desperate symptoms of ‘separation anxiety’ and the dreadful symptoms of fear-conditioning in human-abused animals, leads me to believe that you don’t need language or a large brain to develop a pain-body or be ‘taught to believe’ the terrifying stories of a damaged human egoic mind.

Nevertheless, here we are, we humans, possessed of this amazing intellect that can invent a false self and a dream state ‘world’, and persuade ourselves (and/or be persuaded) that these are real, to the point we ‘forget’ our knowledge of what is really real. This is what I mean when I say that because of our brains’ complexity we have become “too smart for our own good”.

I have been quick to blame our culture for doing this to each of us (seven billion to one is pretty unfair odds) but I’m beginning to appreciate that our culture co-evolved with our brains. I’m beginning to believe that long before we realized (all too recently) that the artifacts and processes of our culture are bringing about the end of stable climate, the end of the industrial economy on which we all utterly depend, and the end of cheap energy (and ultimately, the end of civilization and the sixth great extinction of life on Earth), our big, fierce, intelligent brains were already doing a job on us. The history of pre-industrial eras, from the genocide of Neanderthals and the extinction of large mammals by ‘indigenous’ peoples, to the staggering cruelty and suffering and enslavement of the dynasties of China, the Roman Empire, the Crusades and the Dark Ages, is one of a species already disconnected, already massively mentally ill, already the victim of a brain that can imagine and realize fears and atrocities enough to doom it to quick and nasty (and evolutionarily appropriate) extinction.

This is a far more depressing realization than the one that we have inadvertently overtaxed our planet’s resources to the point of collapse. As I put it in a recent note to Paul:

Evolution of wings, originally for body temperature regulation, to eventually enable creatures to fly — brilliant evolutionary success. Evolution of minds, originally as a feature detection system for the protection and mobility of ‘bodies’ of organs, to eventually create dream states so convincing that the creature mistakes them for reality — ghastly evolutionary mistake.

But here we are. Hence my desire to learn ‘presence’ — to realize who I really am, beneath my mind’s false self, and to realize what the world, the ‘unity’ of which I am an apparently indistinguishable part, really is, beyond my limited perceptions deep within this dream state my mind has concocted.

My reason for reproducing the two diagrams above (from previous posts) is that, between earnest attempts at meditation, I have been focusing my complementary “inquiry and contemplation” practices on the following questions:

1. What are the fears/anxieties/suffering/triggered emotional reactions I am trying to let go of? What is behind them? Are they ‘real’?
2. If I am able to “awaken to my true self” and see the world/myself as it/I really is/am, how will my experience of living, and in particular of anxiety, fear, suffering, grief and anger, change?

The top chart above (with the 7 yellow diamonds) shows what I am (and I think most people to some extent are) afraid of. Fears of the three types on the left, I think, are universal to all creatures, and are instinctive — we’ve evolved to fear them because failure to do so has led the fearless to demise and removal from the gene pool. I’m told that many aboriginal tribes won’t camp overnight under some kinds of large trees because they know that the risk of them falling is relatively high and the consequences of being under them if they do, life-altering. Most wild creatures show far more aversion to risk of entrapment or confinement than to risk of short-term, even acute pain — for good reason.

Fears on the right of this chart are, I think, inculcated by human culture (and afflict our domesticated creatures as well as humans). These are the ones, I think, that we might be free of if we could ‘awaken’ to our true nature. I have a great fear of driving on black ice (I had a one-car accident in 2008, and was part of a 30-car pile-up forty years ago, the only accidents I’ve ever been in, both due to black ice). Part of this is a fear of pain, and of being permanently injured (I’m not really afraid of dying if it’s painless). Part is the fear of being trapped (in an overturned car or away from my ‘safe’ destination). Part is the fear of lack of control, and the fear that my incapacity might cause financial or psychological pain and hardship to others “due to my own stupidity” (fear of embarrassment).

If I were to be able to achieve a persistent state of presence, would these fears change? I’m not sure. As I say, I think the fears on the left side are more “existential”, “real”, and hence I’d guess that being ‘present’ would have less impact on these fears than those on the right (though my ‘presence’ might open me to information that showed fears in both columns to be unwarranted unless I was actually skidding on the ice at that moment). But some would have me believe I would be completely fearless if I were completely present. Maybe so.

I sense that ‘presence’ would have a stronger impact on my (chronic) anxieties than on my (immediate) fears, because they are inherently less existential and more likely to be caused by triggers or ‘feedback loops’ of the types shown in the second chart above (the one with the pink squares). Likewise, while I doubt (despite the reassurance of some yogis and their followers) my experience of (physical) pain would be much affected by learning to reconnect and live in the moment, I’m guessing my experience of (psychological) suffering might be dramatically reduced if not eliminated. And while I expect that some situations of immediate, real threat or directly experienced tragedy might still evoke brief flashes of acute anger and/or sadness, my sense is that it would pass more quickly, and be less likely to be re-triggered by memories or associations of the ‘false self’, if I were successful in my ‘presencing’ practice.

If that were so, the first chart above might lose its entire right half, and the second chart above might start to look like this (this is how I imagine the birds outside my window live):

Of course, if I were in a situation where real threats were constant (e.g. living under relentless harassment) or the pain was constant (e.g. with chronic pain syndrome or in the situation of the woman stuck looking after a highly autistic son in A Long Way Down), I don’t think I’d be able to ‘awaken’ to a state free of anxiety, suffering, or incessant sorrow. Could you?

How do I imagine, in my moments of inquiry and contemplation, my normal state of living if I were able to awaken, connect, and realize who/what I (and the unity of which I am inextricably a part) really am, every moment?

I imagine myself in a state that is at once very relaxed and very aware. A state where my intellect is largely at rest (and damn it needs a rest!) and where my emotions are calm, even, compassionate, and playful — not “under control” but just at peace. A state where my senses and instinct come to the fore, with my senses acute, noticing, connected, taking in, feeling-at-one-with, enjoying, and my instincts are ‘directing’ ‘me’, gently, letting go, letting things come, just being present, being generous, ‘touching’ appropriately when that ‘touch’ would be helpful.

No longer my ‘self’.

I imagine myself being just a part, flying, floating. Green and blue and white, flowing and glowing.

Softening. Getting lighter.

Vanishing.

Thanks to the many people I’ve been speaking with about this in recent weeks, and especially to Paul Heft for the lengthy back-and-forth discussion that has helped me design my “presence” practice and draft this explanation of how and why I am pursuing it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

image: “surreal dimension”, by hartwig kopp-delaney

I really want to spend some time learning to meditate, and practice it faithfully every day. I really want to complement my running program with upper body and flexibility exercises, and integrate them into a whole body/whole mind “presence” practice. I really want to get back to more regular blogging. I really want to compose more music, drawing on a dozen scraps of words and music I’ve been carrying around everywhere I go for months now.

At least that’s what I tell myself. The truth is that when I have free time (which, being retired from paid work, I have often) I use that time doing other things: online reading, playing, daydreaming, sleeping in, hanging out, etc.

The truth is that I want to want to meditate, strengthen my upper body, become present, blog more, and compose more music. When I actually push myself to do these things I enjoy it. But I don’t push myself. Because I don’t really want to do these things. I just want to want to do them. They correspond with my perception of spending time usefully, becoming a more complete, well-rounded person, producing stuff that I can be proud of.

I will accept that I’m lazy (until things get urgent); I think that’s very human. I don’t believe there is anything ‘wrong’ with me (e.g. that this is self-defeating behaviour, that I’m suffering debilitating effects of trauma, etc.), though I think we’re all damaged to some extent by our civilization culture. So why do I do what I do, instead of what I want to want to do?

Part of the reason, I think, is that I’m exhausted. Still, in retirement. I can’t recall the last time I was, for an extended period of time, not exhausted. Another part of the reason, which may be related to exhaustion, is that these things I want to want to do aren’t much fun. They’re “work”, and I’ve done enough work, for now; I want to play. I want the outcomes of these things (presence from meditation, resilience from exercise, outstanding written and musical compositions that bring me a sense of accomplishment), but I’m not that keen on the practices that produce them. They’re not hard work, these practices, but they’re work.

I think this is the reason that the cliche “whatever you want to do, just begin” resonates with me. Once I start, I cease to be aware of these practices as work, and sometimes they’re even fun (it’s mostly the learning component that’s fun). Perhaps that’s the essence, at least for most people, of practice. We don’t want to do it. We want to want to do it. Once we begin, we are happy doing it. Practice is the key to doing just about anything well, and the stock advice of “teachers” of writing, music, art, and just about any other skill of value.

Why do I want to want be present, resilient, and the author of great works of art and imagination? In other words, why do I want to be something a little different from, a little “more” than, everything I am, now? I think this goes back to my feeling that I’ve wasted most of the last 40 years — learned terribly little, terribly slowly, and have terribly little (skill, enduring “output”, evidence of positive effect on others) to show for it. Yes, some work colleagues and clients have told me that they received transformative value from what I did when I worked with them, but, ever the Doubting Thomas, I’m not so sure they really have. Yes, my blog has almost undoubtedly had a greater and more positive impact on more people than all my work life produced. But John Gray (in Straw Dogs) explained more powerfully, eloquently and succinctly than I could ever do how the world really works and where it is headed, and Paul Kingsnorth, in his Manifesto and Orion articles, articulates more effectively how those of us who have moved past the second denial now feel, now that we know why we cannot save the world, and what we might do instead.

So why then, after ridiculing the despicable and opportunistic “self-help” industry and after calling for all of us (by which I mean myself, and perhaps anyone else who might serendipitously be reading) to simply accept ourselves as we really are and always have been, do I want to practice being “better” or “more”? Part of it is self-protective, I think. We’re all traumatized to some extent, and being more present and more resilient would seem a way to cope with and move past the trauma, fears, anger, grief, old absurd fictional stories, and chronic anxiety that dwells in me and be “more fully myself”. That will make me happier, and more useful to others and to the world. If practice can help do that, I think it’s worth pushing myself to practice.

The other part, I think, is the utterly human desire to find my true calling, Sweet Spot, “work I’m meant to do”, passion, gift, purpose, or whatever you want to call it. My distinctive competency. The thing I do (or could do, with practice) better than anyone else, even John Gray or Paul Kingsnorth or TS Eliot or Frederick Barthelme or Neil Young. The song that, if I were a bird (and I wish I were), I would sing. My enduring self-expression.

I appreciate the value of being a competent generalist, a connector, someone who transplants ideas to terrains where no one else could see them taking root. Many have told me that’s what I do, and do well, and I should be content with that, and keep doing it. And I will. But I won’t be content with that. Something in me is still waiting, and struggling, to get out, to escape all the not-me gunk that I have let be attached to me over the years to the point that something important in me has become invisible, even to me. Most of all to me. With practice, I think, I could find it, and set it free.

That’s all. This is just an exhortation to myself to practice what I want to want to do. Even if I think, or know, I don’t really want to do it. An exhortation to just begin. I’m off to do that, now.

(the style of this essay is borrowed from that of NYT nature writer Verlyn Klinkenborg’s brilliant essay & book “Several Short Sentences About Writing”; I’m playing with it as an interesting new form of prose)

1. If we’re going to survive as a species when our civilization crumbles (and when that collapse brings about the end of the industrial economy, the end of abundant cheap energy and the end of stable climate), we are going to have to relearn how to live in community.
2. That will entail relearning to get along with (and to love, not just tolerate) people in our physical communities who we don’t like much. In our modern, anonymous, isolating society we have not had to do this.
3. Getting along with people we don’t like will require us to study, understand and appreciate why they are the way they are. They are the way they are for a reason.
4. Once we appreciate this reason, we will be able to empathize with their behaviour, and from that it’s a short journey to loving them.
5. One of the likely reasons they are the way they are is that, because of how and where they were raised, they learned that this is a good way to be. A good way to be, depending on the worldview you’re endowed with (and evolve through critical and imaginative thinking) is one that is, at least for you: Moral, safe, rewarded and/or mandated.
6. This good way to be, to others who do not share your worldview, may come across as: Unreasonable, cruel, insane, insensitive, irrational, defensive, insufferable, frightening, threatening and/or reality-denying.
7. There are a number of evolved “rules” for behaviour in modern businesses (and most workplaces), and generally in the Anglo-American cultures (and some other cultures) that reflect a certain, now widely-prevalent antipathetic worldview. These rules include:
   • Do not express your feelings. That is a sign of weakness. Only exception: Male superiors may express (justifiable) anger towards subordinates.
   • Do not accept responsibility, and, more specifically, make and hold others responsible for as much as possible. You always want to have more power (authority) than you have responsibility. Otherwise you will get none of the credit and all of the blame (and most of the work).
   • Someone must always be to blame. It is always about “human error”, weakness, failure. To admit otherwise would be to acknowledge that we, civilized humans, and especially our leaders, are not in control and/or do not really know what is going on.
   • We must never admit that no one is in control and that no one really knows what is going on, because to do so would forfeit our authority, undermine our sense of self-control and the natural hierarchical order of things, and hence lead to terror and anarchy.
   • We must, ourselves, always appear to be in control and to know what is going on. The best way to do this is to convince ourselves it is true.
8. There is no room for empathy, or the embracing of uncertainty, ambiguity or complexity in such a worldview.
9. Evolving an alternative worldview that does allow room for these things is essential to us rediscovering how to live in true community. Such a worldview would have these qualities and favour these behaviours:
   • We know ourselves well: We know what we are competent at (and not), what we love (and hate) doing, what triggers us and why.
   • We believe everyone is doing their best, and everyone is, to some extent, suffering and handicapped and in need.
   • When someone exhibits behaviour that we don’t understand, we talk and work with that person and with others in the community to try to understand it. We try hard not to judge it.
   • We are distrustful of hierarchy and avoid it as much as possible.
   • We believe in the power of consensus, empathy, conversation and appreciative inquiry, and the wisdom of the crowd.
   • When something happens that triggers anger, fear, anxiety, sadness or grief, we recognize the trigger for what it is and don’t let it own us. We own it. We appreciate that the trigger is our “stuff”, not that of the person who provoked it.
   • We trust that the person was not maliciously trying to trigger us, and try to understand why they said or did what they did. We don’t try to “fix” the situation so it can’t recur, or “fix” the person who provoked it. We accept them for who they are.
   • We let it go and move on.
10. When our economy collapses, and central organizations can no longer do things for us (give us jobs, provide us services, import and export things, transport us by air, inform us, entertain us, treat our illnesses and accidents, train us, or tell us what to do) we will have to learn to invite people in our local communities to come together to find ways to do these things for ourselves.
11. By “ourselves” I mean all of us living in a local physical community, the people who happen to live in the same neighbourhood when the shit hits the fan. By “ourselves” I do not mean us as dangerously armed individuals behind a bunker and barbed wire with large amounts of emergency provisions and duct tape. These provisions, no matter how extensive or carefully assembled, will run out long before the Long Emergency does. And to believe that we can survive system collapse “alone” in some kind of nuclear family unit is pure hubris.
12. None of this will happen quickly; over the next few decades it will get intermittently better and worse, but mostly worse, in periods of punctuated equilibrium. We will have time to relearn to do this stuff. But it wouldn’t hurt to start now; there’s a lot to relearn and we’re going to make a lot of awful mistakes in the process.
13. The communities we find ourselves in when this happens will be accidental communities. We may want them to be intentional communities, full of like-minded people with broad, deep, complementary skills. But they won’t.
14. Our accidental communities will include (probably many) individuals struggling with one or more of these challenges: Homelessness, alcohol, gambling, nicotine, drug and other addictions (to many kinds of substances and behaviours), chronic depression (possibly suicidal), physical mobility issues, Alzheimers, autism spectrum and other dissociative behaviours, visual and/or auditory incapacity, dependence on expensive and complex medications, autoimmune diseases, cancers, anger and sexual abuse issues (both protagonists and victims), propensity to steal, vigilantism, mental illnesses, incapacity to care for themselves (e.g. orphaned and abandoned children), inability to speak the native language (e.g. refugees), religious and political intolerance, chromosome dysfunctions (e.g. Down’s), learning disabilities, bullying behaviours, narcissism, obsessive/compulsive behaviours and beliefs (e.g. conspiracy theories), exaggerated and diminished sense of self-worth, and many others. As the struggles get harder and the crises deepen, we will all start to manifest more of these behaviours. There will likely be no central institutions to deal with these issues outside our communities. We will have to find a way to deal with them ourselves.
15. Empathy is a quality that is neither essential nor common in our modern civilization. It takes spending some time with the worldview summarized in point 9 above, and a lot of practice, to be skilled at it. Bonobos appear to be skilled at it.
16. I, for one, am not skilled at it.
17. Empathy is not just a feeling; it is an offering. It is something you give another because you want to, and because you can. It cannot be extracted by demand, or by plea, or (for very long) by manipulation or coercion. If it’s not genuine it’s not empathy.
18. Empathy is not feeling sorry for someone. It is the capacity to understand, accept, appreciate and care about another’s feelings, and, sometimes, to convey that to the ones one empathizes with (through words, expression, touch and other means). Its presence or absence drives the behaviours and actions we take as part of a community.
19. In the coming decades, as our lives revolve more and more around the accidental communities in which we find ourselves, empathy will become, along with facilitation and mentoring skills, absolutely crucial. Without it, these communities will disintegrate. With it, they will be able to create new, stable, resilient societies.
20. It is likely that, across the globe, some communities will succeed at this, and others will fail. It will be impossible to predict which will succeed, or why, so any success will probably not be replicable. Each tribe will succeed on its own. Or not.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been attending conferences and small-group meetings in Seattle, Washington DC and Toronto to show people the Group Works deck: a set of 91 cards representing a “pattern language” of best practices and processes that can be invoked in various group activities: Meetings, group deliberative and learning sessions of various kinds and sizes, and even small group conversations.

The message at all of these events has been the same: By learning to be a better facilitator (formally or informally) of such group activities, you can dramatically improve their effectiveness — how much people learn, the quality of decisions made, the depth of relationships built, the level of mutual trust and appreciation, and the conversational, deliberative and collaborative skills of all participants.

The audiences were of two “flavours”: People concerned with civic/community engagement (consultation with and/or recruitment of citizens for political or volunteer awareness or activism), and people concerned with the effectiveness of learning, knowledge-sharing, technology and decision-making in their (mostly business) organizations. Both types of audience readily admit to the need for better group processes and facilitation skills. But because filling this need is no one’s “job” there is little awareness of, or consensus on, just how this might be accomplished. The Group Works card deck provides a fun, intuitive way to gain appreciation of what these processes, practices and skills are (and how they might be improved). As one of many authors of this non-profit tool, I take every opportunity to be an evangelist for it.

I’ve written a rather silly, short 9-scene play exemplifying “worst practices” in group process as a means of introducing and orienting people to the cards. I pick volunteers from the audience to act out the script, and my audiences really seem to like identifying what “went wrong” in each scene and how invoking the patterns on the cards could have led to much better outcomes.  So when I visit with people at these events, show them the cards and how to use them, “play” with them in front of audiences, and practice employing the cards in simulated meetings, conversations and other deliberative activities, the decks practically sell themselves (we’re a non-profit, and we charge just enough to recoup printing and other development costs).

I am pleased that, in this work, I am helping people to improve learning, decision-making, meeting effectiveness, trust, relationships and interpersonal skills. This is important, in just about every context of our modern lives.

But since I retired from paid work two and a half years ago, I’ve become aware of just how radically different the context of most people’s lives (including those of my recent audiences) is from my own. A few of the attendees are aware of my blog and the worldview it attempts to convey — one of a civilization on the brink of an inevitable, wrenching series of cascading economic, energy and ecological crises that will culminate, in the latter part of this century, in its collapse, and usher in an unrecognizably different, relocalized, low-tech, subsistence way of life.

There is even some quiet acknowledgement that my “joyful pessimist’s” take on our future is probably right. But for the most part, beyond a sad smile and a shrug from those familiar with my writing, there is little interest in discussing such a dark future, or even discussing how the skills and capacities that facilitation in general, and the Group Works deck in particular, might be applied to help us all cope with such a future.

So I have felt, for the past two weeks, as if there is a giant elephant in the room that has followed me from Seattle to DC to Toronto, and will probably follow me home to Vancouver, one that almost no one but me is able to see.

The audiences that I have met are, at heart, believers in one form or another of what I have called “magical thinking”. They believe that the crises we face today can be resolved by education or persuasion or activism or prayer or innovation or greater consciousness or a million small acts of intelligence and kindness, or some combination of the above. And that through this resolution we will be able, somehow, to continue to live the privileged, resource-exhausting, extravagant life that we have come to see as the only way to live, and perhaps even allow the 90% of humans who can now only dream of such a life (and probably do, as they see it depicted in the ubiquitous global media) to share in it as well.

I wonder why I do not challenge this belief, which, I can see in the eyes of many I meet these days, is becoming ever more tenuous, more doubtful. Magical thinking continues now, I suspect, not because people really believe it, but because they want to believe it, they cannot bear to not believe it. I should, if I am a believer in taking my own medicine, be “naming” this doubt, this foolish magical thinking. As the “Naming” card in the Group Works deck says: “Call it out, stating directly what is perceived. Naming functions to birth things not yet recognized by the group, sometimes things that are taboo… to name can be to transform.”

So what if I were to stand up in front of a group of business people or a group of believers in the power of public engagement, and tell them I believe everything they were doing was a waste of time, of energy, of their lives (and why I believe that)? What if I were to tell them that I want them to learn to be better “group process facilitators”, not so that their organizations will be more innovative or better learning environments, and not so that they will be better able to achieve consensus and creative ideas to transform our industrial growth society, but because our 30,000 year old human civilization is about to come to a crashing halt over the next 50-75 short years, and deep and broad group process skills are going to be absolutely essential to coping with this crash?

In other words, what if I were willing to “name” the elephant in the room that most cannot see, and those who can see, or intuitively sense its presence don’t want — or can’t bear — to acknowledge? Am I really doing anyone a favour? Or is it enough, and is it better, that I help people learn to appreciate and acquire essential skills to do things that, in the long run, don’t matter, so that when those skills are desperately needed to do things that do matter, things that will make a critical difference in a world without an industrial “growth” economy, without abundant cheap energy, without a stable climate, they will have learned and practiced those skills?

You can order copies of the deck, download a free PDF copy and learn about the project on our website, groupworksdeck.org. The cards can be used to prepare for a group event, to reflect on and debrief a recent event, to learn, self-assess and teach facilitation, conversation and other group process skills, to deal with group process nightmares in the moment, and as an inspiration or “oracle”  for thinking about your group process work. 

Since my retirement, I’ve been attempting to practice being more present. One of the obstacles, I’ve discovered, is that I’m not entirely sure what presence ‘looks’ or ‘feels’ like. I think meditation is a worthwhile practice, but it doesn’t quite capture the full sense of ‘being present’ — that rare and remarkable feeling of being simultaneously relaxed and aware, totally ‘in the moment’. It’s the kind of high-performance state that is needed, I think, to be either an excellent facilitator or an excellent creator.

ee cummings and TS Eliot describe the need for a poet to be in that state of being that is completely attuned and open to what is, such that the creation seems almost to occur through them rather than by them. But they also explain that the craft of poetry both entertains (e.g. through evocative imagery or a clever turn of phrase) and brings new insight or perspective, a new way of looking at things the reader has never considered. To cummings this was a never-ending fight; to Eliot it was the painstakingly hard work of the writer.

It would seem almost impossible to at once ‘be’ in that open, creative state and ‘do’ the hard, struggling work, needed to produce great poetry. I think the reason it seems so impossible is because it is — I think there may be in fact two different states of presence.

The first, which I’m calling ‘Now Time’ presence, is that relaxed, aware, open state of high perceptiveness, imagination and connection in which you are totally attuned to what is and open to what could be. The second, which I’m calling ‘Clock Time’ presence, is the focused, attentive, self-disciplined, synthesizing state in which you are able to bring everything you know to bear to do something extremely competently. You’ve probably experienced moments of both, though probably not at the same time.The first is more a ‘being’ state, a somatic one in which your body is utterly at one and at peace with the rest of the world. The second is more of a ‘doing’ state, a social one in which you are sufficiently attuned to others’ sensibilities to be able to produce something that will resonate with them (though in the case of poetry you may not not quite how it will resonate with different readers). The first lets you sense and feel what is, while the second lets you capture it so others can feel it too.

Both are high-performance states, but they are very different. From studying great writing I have learned that its creation is often iterative, and I’m proposing that it is when some of those iterations are in ‘Now Time’ presence and others are in ‘Clock Time’ presence, that the best writing is most likely to result.

Let’s look at an example. TS Eliot wrote his Four Quartets over a period of years, and there is evidence they were extensively edited and reworked as he wrote subsequent works. Take a look at section I of the first quartet, Burnt Norton, the section ending with:

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

And now read the final section V of the final quartet Little Gidding, written years later and meant as a completely separate work, which includes the following:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from… And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

I would argue that the haunting, stark, playful and beautiful images in this work came to Eliot when he was in a state of “Now Time” presence, while the craftsmanship, the careful and precise choice of words, the brilliant re-statements and circular integration of ideas and images into a cohesive whole, occured when he was in a state of “Clock Time” presence. Eliot claimed that the only way to evoke emotion in the reader of poetry was through the use of images, though whether the emotion evoked was precisely the one the writer had hoped for was not the poet’s business. But images alone are not enough, he wrote, in an essay The Social Function of Poetry:

Poetry has to give pleasure… [and] the communication of some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or the expression of something we have experienced but have no words for, which enlarges our consciousness or refines our sensibility… We all understand I think both the kind of pleasure that poetry can give and the kind of difference, beyond the pleasure, which it makes to our lives. Without producing these two effects it is simply not poetry.

These two effects, I believe, require two different states of presence to produce, and what comes to the poet in each of these states must then be crafted together into something that is neither overly sensuous and emotional nor overly intellectual. This, I think, is why poetry of the calibre of the Four Quartets is so rare.

So what does each of these states of presence ‘look’ like, and how are they different? The fact that Eliot’s quartets draw on quaternities (the four seasons, the four elements etc.) got me thinking about Jung’s quaternity and the four aspects of the self: Emotional, intellectual, instinctual, and sensual. I tried to draw how dominant each of these four aspects of self are in each of the two states of presence, and in two more prosaic, lower-performance states: the state of constant anxiety in which many of us live most of our lives, and the state of ecstasy we feel during sex or under the influence of euphoria-producing substances or activities (most of them quite addictive). I’ve reproduced these sketches above.

From this perspective, the two states of presence are quite different, and I would argue it is impossible to be in both of these high-performance states at once. The “Clock Time” presence state (upper right sketch) is the one most of those we have relationships with would like us to be in as often as possible: Attentive, responsive, active, alert, and working unselfishly. This is the state wild creatures shift into automatically when they face a fight-or-flight crisis. It’s amazingly productive, but it’s exhausting and, I suspect, unsustainable. We can’t be “on” all the time. Still, this state allows our intellectual selves to dominate, supported by our sensual and instinctual selves, and, of necessity, we need to subordinate our emotions to the task at hand. We may be effective in this state, but, as cummings would say, we’re not really “ourselves”.

Wild creatures, many biologists now think, spend most of their lives in a “Now Time” present state (lower right sketch). This is the state that, I believe, corresponds to the relaxed/aware state of high creativity I occasionally enjoy: playful, joyful, living in the moment, highly perceptive (rather than conceptive, as in the “Clock Time” presence state). It is a meditative, letting go/letting come state in which our instinctual, intuitive selves dominate, supported by our emotional and sensual selves, with our intellectual selves subordinated. It’s an open, ‘being’ state rather than a directed, ‘doing’ state.

By contrast, most humans seem to spend most of their lives in the chronically anxious state (upper left sketch), dominated by (mostly ‘negative’) emotions, reinforced by the fictitious stories we are told by our culture or which we tell ourselves. Except, that is, for the brief respites we get in moments of sensory-overload ecstasy (lower left sketch) — mostly sex and escapist activities. No surprise we prefer this state to the state of chronic anxiety, even if this state has to be artificially induced and proves to be highly addictive.

Those are my thoughts, for what they’re worth, on what the two states of presence ‘look’ like. The obvious next question is: How do we shift into these two high-performance states, and back and forth between them, more easily and skilfully? I’m working on that, but, paradoxically, I might have to be in those states to figure out how to get there.

Trust is an essential requirement for an effective, functional community. Our modern, anonymous neighbourhoods provide none of the prerequisites for trust, and hence can never be true communities. In our search for community, many of us reach out instead to those outside our neighbourhoods, looking for support, or reassurance, or knowledge, or partners, or just company. But what is it that makes us trust, or distrust, someone? Is trust something that must be earned, or is it implicit, and can only be destroyed and lost?

Much has been written lately on this subject. Many would argue that trust is something that grows with mutual knowledge, openness, and sharing. I think that’s true to some extent but I believe trust is much more primal than that. It surely predated language. It is evident in non-humans who do not use language as we do, and whose social networks are not established the way ours are. Watch two dogs meeting for the first time and you’ll see what underlies the establishment and building or destruction of trust. We are, after all, much more than our minds, and our minds, I would argue, play a relatively minor role in the establishment of trust. Here’s how I think it works, based on my own observation of creatures human and non:

1. As Keith Johnstone explains in Impro, when we first meet someone, before a word is spoken, our whole bodies are sending and receiving signals, largely unconsciously, to and from the other person. Our processing of those signals is also largely unconscious, as our conscious minds generally tend to rationalize and/or second-guess, rather than create, our immediate impression of another person, including their trustworthiness. This is an obvious evolutionary process: Facing an unknown creature in the wild, having to rely on our slow thought processes, or on conversation with them, could prove fatal. Instead we use sensory and chemical clues: Eye movements, facial expressions, pheromones and other chemical signals, whole-body stances, postures and movements, and tone of voice. When we “meet” someone virtually, online, we struggle with the shortage of such clues, over-relying on the few that are available, and trying to suspend judgement until we have more.
2. Once these chemical and sensory signals have been processed, we can build (or destroy) trust through getting to know them intellectually. In this second stage of trust-building, what we are seeking, I think, is either a shared worldview, or alternatively one that we can appreciate (i.e. understand it well enough to have a sense of (a) what the other person thinks is “true”, and why s/he thinks so, (b) what principles the other person believes in (what is “good” or “fair”), and (c) as a consequence, what that person is likely to do in any given situation. Once we think we know how someone will behave in a situation, we can trust them — they are unlikely to surprise us. What’s important is not agreeing with their actions but “knowing” them well enough to predict those actions.
3. A third level of trust-building occurs when our instinctive/sensory/chemical sense of someone’s trustworthiness, and our intellectual knowledge/appreciation of them, is tested through actual collaboration — shared experiences, especially of mutual reliance or co-dependence. If their actions during these experiences conform with our positive intuitive and intellectual expectations, there is likely to be a strong bond of trust formed, as all three types of “evidence” indicate the person is trustworthy. I would argue that if there is an absence of sensory/chemical or intellectual basis for trust, positive collaborative experiences alone will not be enough — there will be lingering doubts about what motivated the other’s behaviour in these experiences (a desire just to please, or to create a false sense of confidence, for example).

The destruction of trust can occur the same way, except in reverse. Have some bad collaborative experiences with someone you thought you knew and could trust, and you’ll be suspicious and disappointed, but still probably have faith that it was an aberration — after all, your instincts have told you they’re trustworthy, and you think you “know” them well enough to believe they wouldn’t normally do that. You’ll probably give them another chance, and only if you’re disappointed again will you conclude you didn’t really know them as well as you thought, and that they can’t be trusted.

Likewise, if you get into a discussion or situation that reveals that that person’s worldview — their sense of what is, and why it is that way, or their sense of what’s good or fair, is very different from what you supposed, and you’ll suspect they’re facile, or erratic, or dishonest, or even psychotic, and whatever trust you might have built between you will be destroyed.

If something should occur that changes the basic sensory or chemical signals you give off to that other person, or they send to you, then the degree of intellectual appreciation and positive shared experience you have between you can quickly become moot. You may never know what happened — it may be something that happened to you that has nothing to do with the other person, or vice versa — but somehow you just “know” that the trust you built between you is gone, and rebuilding it, through no one’s fault, will be enormously difficult.

That’s my sense of what underlies, builds and destroys trust, anyway. I tend to be more tuned in to my instincts than most people, and to trust them more than most, so perhaps my perceptions of trust are different from others’. But trust is so important, and will become much more so as we face mounting crises in the coming decades that will require us to re-create local community and to trust those in our communities. We need to know what that will entail, and the challenges building trust will present.

I‘m not a believer in self-help books, the value of leadership, gurus, transformation, twelve-step programs or, despite the title of this blog, saving the world. Pollard’s Law of Complexity states: Things (and people) are the way they are for a reason. If you want to change something (or someone), it helps to know that reason. If that reason is complex, success at changing it is unlikely, and adapting to it is probably a better strategy. Complex systems have self-reinforcing positive feedback loops that keep them the way they are, and which find ways to circumvent interventions intended to change or reverse them. If it helps you to believe that, under the right circumstances, you and the rest of our species can do anything we make our minds up to do, that’s fine, but this post is probably not for you.

I am a believer in asking “important” questions. An important question, as the word’s etymology implies, is one that “brings in” something new to your thought processes. That may be new information, a new perspective, or new ideas, something that sparks your creative or critical thinking in a novel way. My experience has been that enduring change generally follows revelation, not rhetoric. At any point in our lives we are ready to accept some new information, ideas or perspectives, and not ready to accept others.

The revelations and significant changes in my life that were not forced upon me by immediate circumstances, have come from three activities: (1) Studying/learning something new (the I didn’t know that! moment); (2) Being presented with a new synthesis or combination of information that I’d not put together myself (the aha! moment); and (3) Reflecting on important questions. This essay is about the third type of activity.

Most important questions, I have found, are hard. That is, there is no obvious or easy answer to them, and even understanding the question takes time and work. These questions often have dismissive answers that we use all the time to justify not thinking about them, or reassure ourselves that they don’t apply to us, or that there’s no point dwelling on them anyway since there’s nothing that can be done. We will dismiss them until we’re ready, until the pain or cognitive dissonance of our unquestioned lives or worldviews exceeds the difficulty of dwelling on and tackling the question.

What’s more, I don’t think there are all that many important, hard questions. What underlies them all is our personal happiness, or, more often, unhappiness, and our curiosity for answers, to know and understand. Each of these questions is dense and complex — hence the temptation to dismiss them when we’re not absolutely ready to explore them. Most of them are “how” (what process/practice can I use?) questions with underlying “why” (how did things get this way?) questions. The “answer” to each question is personal, elusive, inexact, and ephemeral. Here are the questions, first without context and then repeated with my own context and explanation of why I think they’re important and what they mean to me, which you may find either illuminating or limiting. I’ve posted them on my refrigerator, and often choose one to ponder when I’m out running or walking.

OK, now some context (but no answers):

1. How can I discover who I really am? Self-knowledge, I think, is a prerequisite to self-awareness and self-love, and to knowing what we ‘should’ do, think and believe. It’s about discovering what brings us joy, what we’re ‘meant’ to do. Most of what I’ve learned about myself has come from understanding what my physical body and my ‘mind’ are, from studying human nature, and studying nature, and most of all from trying to do a lot of different things and seeing the result and what I came to know as a result.

2. How can I stop doing the things I hate doing? I keep telling myself I only have one life and my time is precious, yet I suspect I will be like so many who, at the end of their lives, lament wasting much of it in activities that brought them no joy. So why do so many of us persist doing things we hate, and putting off doing what we love? Duty? Responsibility? Fear? Lack of imagination? Addiction? Can’t help ourselves? Or is it because we come to believe the stories that others tell us, and that we tell ourselves, because it’s easier than changing?

3. How can I live where and how I want? About half of the average North American’s expenses relate to the place they live — home maintenance, commuting etc. Yet many of us dream about living elsewhere, living differently. We live a life style that’s unsustainable. And complain about the weather. So what’s holding us back? Can/should we just “learn” to be genuinely happy where we are?

4. How can I set myself free? In my last post I quoted Wolfi Landstreicher: “We want to live as wild, free beings in a world of wild, free beings. The humiliation of having to follow rules, of having to sell our lives away to buy survival, of seeing our usurped desires transformed into abstractions and images in order to sell us commodities fills us with rage. How long will we put up with this misery?” Yet I remain in this prison inside my head in the larger prison of my culture. I remain too attached to fears, to beliefs, to stuff. My goal of learning “presence” remains as elusive as ever. As I reduce the stress in my life, I get less practiced at coping with stress, so when it happens I get even more triggered, captured, cowed by it. How can I let it go, move past it?

5. What can I (learn to) do to make the world a better place (doing something that I love)? Like most, I am still looking to make a difference, to do something that I can take pride in, something that will outlast me and help many live better lives. I don’t want credit for it; I just want to know that I did something to mitigate the cruelty and suffering that this terrible culture inflicts on all of us, and which is getting worse. Or that I created something beautiful and memorable and enduring that many could enjoy. Not out of anger or struggle or feeling of responsibility, but as an act of joy and love.

6. How can I make love last? This is Tim Tom Robbins’ famous question. We all want it to last forever. Why is it so hard? Does our culture make it impossible, or is it not in our nature?

7. How can I find the right partners (to love/live with/work with)? This was never an issue when we lived in small, closed communities. In a community of 150, it’s a problem of collective self-organization. In a connected world of seven billion, it’s an impossibility. How can we at least make it easier, especially when (see question #1) so many don’t know who they are or what they’re looking for?

8. How can I be ready for what the future holds? We are heading into what James Kunstler calls The Long Emergency, decades of waves of turbulence, discontinuous change, challenge and unpredictable Black Swan events. But we don’t know when, where or how crises will unfold, or how severe they will be. Humans (and other creatures) are not designed or equipped to think about or prepare for high levels of uncertainty, volatility, or unpredictability, especially when they’re chronic and long-term. How can I learn to be resilient no matter what happens, less dependent on distant, centralized, fragile systems and infrastructure, and on other people to tell me, in the moment, what to do?

9. What comes next? What will I do next? Not what I should do next or could do next or am scheduled to do next, but what do I choose to do (or not do) next? Or do I really have any choice? Will I procrastinate, or do something easy or fun instead of that huge and/or unpleasant task waiting to get done, because that’s just who I am (in which case why not accept that and stop setting myself up for disappointment and failure)? If I choose to do something I like instead of something that is expected of me, could that change everything? Or if I just get started on that huge project I’ve been putting off, perhaps a project I’ve always wanted to do but just seemed too daunting, could that change everything? And looking at the question another way, in the context of collaborative activities with others, or a conversation I just had, what comes next to move forward, or to move in a different direction, or to act on a challenge or obstacle or need? What needs to happen next? What wants to happen next? What comes next if we all just keep doing what we’re doing, and can I live with that? Also, we live in an age of just-in-time learning and actions, that does not leave room for practice, and therefore perhaps eaves no room for excellence. Does whatever “comes next” allow me time and space to practice what I must to be competent to handle “what comes next” after that?

10. What if…? (e.g. we lived in a world without property, or without growth) The purpose of asking “what if” questions, in my opinion, is not to lead to the subsequent question So how do we make that a reality? That’s loading the questions in a way that is sure to lead to discouragement. Things are the way they are for a reason. The purpose of “what if” questions, I believe, is to open our minds and imaginations to what might have been, or might one day be, or might be possible on a small scale or as an experiment. It’s creating another model of the world to mine it for ideas and insights. If we lived in a world with no growth (no population or economic growth), for example, would it be sensible to make new building and automobile construction illegal? What would that mean for dealing with urban sprawl, brownfield redevelopment, forest destruction, the redefinition of community, recycling, renovation, craftsmanship? What can we learn from that that we might apply to the world we have? What could we be doing therefore that would be sensible even if that “what if” wasn’t even a possibility? If we lived in a world without (private) property, how would we make zoning and development decisions? How would we negotiate what gets built and manufactured, and who gets to use it? What can we learn from this that might be useful and bold, even in a “private property” world? What if… we lived in a world without money? What if…?

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I’ve tried in this post (it’s hard) to avoid proffering advice. If you choose to reply to this post, please tell me, and other readers, what you have tried doing to answer these questions, rather than suggesting what others “should” do. Or add to the list — I stopped at ten, but there are undoubtedly other important, hard questions that merit consideration and thoughtful reflection. I’ve asked a hundred questions in this post. The purpose isn’t to solicit answers, but to challenge you, if you’re so inclined, to ask them of yourself (actually I wrote this post to challenge myself to ask them of myself more often).

So, what is the reward for the hard work of asking and thinking about these questions? For me, there are two rewards. The first is that I feel a little more in control of my life, and of myself, a little more conscious of and self-directed in the choices I make. It helps me in my striving to be nobody-but-myself.

And secondly, even when my mind doesn’t want to ask these questions, my body is asking them all the time. It is telling me in a thousand ways (stress-related illness, the embodiment of my anger, sadness and fear) that the decisions I make and the way I lead my life often don’t make sense. My body’s been good to me, and I believe it is in my best interest to listen to it, and think about these questions, and even let it have its say in my reflections on them. Doing so helps me cope with and make a tentative peace with this terrible world, far more effectively than the popular alternatives of escapism and inurement. The questions may be hard, but the alternatives of an unexamined, unquestioning life are, I think, harder still.