There are, it would seem, nearly as many approaches and therapies for dealing with triggers — events and actions that provoke negative emotions in us — as there are potential believers in them. Although I try to be open-minded about this, at this point in my life I tend to believe that there are a relatively tiny number of people with the skill, time and understanding of human nature to be able to help those afflicted (and I think that’s just about all of us, though I admit that triggers are more debilitating for some than others), over time, to recognize and ‘manage’ their triggers better. I have almost no use for the vast number of ‘self-help’ books that purport to help people deal with these on their own.

My sense is that most triggers tend to provoke three broad classes of negative emotional responses (there may well be triggers for positive emotions, but as long as they’re authentic and not delusional I’m content to see them as a good thing):

• anger, jealousy/envy, hatred, self-hatred
• fear, anxiety, dread, helplessness, feeling ‘trapped’
• sadness, grief, shame, guilt, sorrow. hopelessness, anguish

This intuitive grouping corresponds well to Parrot’s emotion ‘tree’ (though I sense that the ‘anger’ and ‘sadness’ groupings are more closely connected than we might think). The triggers for any of these negative emotions depend on our own experience and worldview. For example, many of us get angry at being mistreated, fearful when we sense danger, and sad when we hear tragic news. What underlies all of these emotions, I think, is suffering — real or potential, past, present or future, personal or on behalf of those we care about. Suffering is a consequence of pain (though some would say not inevitably so). And there is a lot of pain in our overcrowded, overstressed, exhausted world.

In an article last spring I attempted to lay out a strategy for avoidance of and coping with triggers. I have tried very hard to apply it. To my credit, I think I have become much better at recognizing when I have been triggered, and the direct cause (event or action) and indirect causes (traumatic events in my past, feelings of incompetency etc.) All of these ’causes’ are, of course, stories (about myself, others, the past or the future) and all of them, as people like Tolle and Richard Moss will tell you, are inventions. That doesn’t mean the trauma wasn’t real or the feeling isn’t valid — it just means that what is causing suffering now when a triggering event occurs is our own intellectual and emotional processing — the stories we create to explain what happened and why, what will happen and why, or what we believe is true and why, and the negative emotions that these stories immediately provoke.

So, for example, when someone suddenly cuts in front of me in traffic after shouting ‘asshole’ in my window and giving me the finger, a flurry of negative emotions are provoked by the stories I immediately invent about this event:

• this guy has publicly disrespected me for no valid reason (anger)
• the guy is dangerous, and will now try to physically hurt me as a result of his anger (fear)
• I was not paying attention, and must have created a traffic hazard, perhaps by wandering over the line (shame)

When this happens, I am pretty good at recognizing both the stories I am telling about it and the emotions these stories provoke. I’m even getting better at helping others, when they are triggered (even when it’s by my actions) to recognize the stories they are telling about it and the emotions these stories are provoking in them.

What I am not good at is preventing myself from getting triggered at all. As I move to prevent and avoid situations (and people) who I think are likely to trigger me, I find that as the situations that can trigger me get (on average) tamer, my sensitivity to them is actually increasing (perhaps due to lack of practice). So (what I perceive as) a mild personal rebuke now triggers me more than it used to.

And, worse, when I get triggered, the process I prepared for myself, and try to practice, to cope with the trigger, is not working at all. This process is:

1. Recognize what I’m feeling (the pain and the emotions), and recognize the stories I’m telling myself that provoked these emotions. Don’t judge the validity of either the stories or the emotions in the moment. Just accept that this is who I am.
2. Understand, take time to let feelings/thoughts settle, and put things in perspective.
   • For fear: What is it I really fear? Is the threat real? What does responding fearfully to these situations get me? Five years from now looking back, will my current fearful response seem justified? What steps can I reasonably take to mitigate the threat or its impact?
   • For anger and sadness: Be generous, appreciative and forgiving of others. Imagine alternative stories that make the behaviour that angered/saddened me more understandable.
3. Be present. Breathe. Be aware of my body, how I am ‘embodying’ what I am thinking and feeling.
4. Express my feelings. Let them out. Discharge.
5. Let go of the feelings. If it’s a ‘fear’ trigger, let go too of the need for (and illusion of) control and certainty. Take the existential step of realizing that there is only this moment, now, and that I am not my mind, not my thoughts, not my feelings.

In reality, after doing step 1 I tend to jump directly to 4. I can’t help myself. And the problem with that is, by discharging what I feel too quickly and emotionally, I can trigger others, creating a vicious cycle of triggering. It can take me a long time to get around to 2, and if I were to be honest with myself, I probably don’t really do 3 or 5 at all.

The theory behind the ‘discharging’ step is the argument that all wild creatures do this after a stressful ‘fight or flight’ incident. They explode with anger. Then, immediately, they ‘shake it off’ physically — you can see this in animals that have just fought or just escaped danger. And then, supposedly, it’s done, forgotten.

Except it doesn’t seem to work that way for humans. Perhaps our brains get in the way, or perhaps our bodies are just not yet well-adapted to the types of triggers and stresses we face in modern civilization. In his book You Are Not So Smart, David McRaney cites studies that suggest that catharsis — venting our anger — does not discharge it at all, it keeps it in our system, and makes us more aggressive and more prone to seek ways to vent our anger when the next situation arises. Perhaps this is because of our egoic minds (it is doubtful most other creatures waste their time inventing stories about others’ motivations) — another facet of being ‘too smart for our own good.’ McRaney explains:

Catharsis will make you feel good, but it’s an emotional hamster wheel. The emotion which led you to catharsis will still be there afterward, and if it made you feel good, you’ll seek it out again in the future… Smashing plates or kicking doors after a fight with a roommate, spouse or lover doesn’t redirect your fury, it perpetuates your rancor. If you spank your children while infuriated, remember you are reinforcing something inside yourself. Common sense says venting is an important way to ease tension, but common sense is wrong. Venting – catharsis – is pouring fuel into a fire… [Instead, cool off]: delay your response, relax or distract yourself with an activity totally incompatible with aggression.

McRaney sites other studies that suggests catharsis (crying) often doesn’t help people recover from emotions of sadness, either — especially if it’s ‘protest crying’ — a plea for help rather than an expression of sadness.

But how are you supposed to start by ‘cooling off’ when your emotional reaction — the anger, fear or sadness you feel — is so powerful, so overwhelming that it just comes out, spontaneously?

There are a lot of sometimes-conflicting views on how to ‘manage’ the emotions that these triggers evoke:

• So-called “anger management” programs focus on dealing with people who express their anger in physically or psychologically violent or threatening ways, and I think we can all agree that violent venting, directed against others, is abhorrent behaviour.
• Some people argue that we need to be angry before we are ready to act to change something that needs changing but where advocating change poses a great personal risk — that our anger can effectively be ‘channelled’ into positive intention and activism.
• In some cases (e.g. some childhood trauma victims), where external expression of anger or fear was or is taboo, people may internalize this feeling, and it may end up being expressed as sadness, shame, or grief. In these cases, some therapists would say it is better to be angry, to re-externalize this emotion. Might ‘anger catharsis’ work better for these sufferers than ‘sadness catharsis’ (crying)?
• Grief counsellors often advise working through sadness at your own pace, aiming to reach acceptance, to the point the sufferer can to some extent ‘let go’ of their grief.
• Most would agree, I think, that learning something new is always a good strategy, whether it’s just a distraction from the negative emotion, or acquiring self-knowledge or more knowledge about the situation or people that triggered the emotion, in order to better understand the psychological dynamics at work.

But none of this really answers the question: What can you do if you can’t ‘help yourself’ from immediately (non-violently) discharging your feelings of anger, fear or sadness, when there is (apparently) no cathartic benefit to doing so — in fact, your discharge may make you feel worse, may trigger others, may provoke additional or more extended negative emotions in you, and may increase your tendency to seek similar (unhelpful) catharsis in future recurrences?

In the diagram above I propose two ‘self-healing interventions’ we can try to invoke in the moment when we feel ourselves being triggered. The first entails changing the story we tell ourselves, either by finding a more benign one (in the case of anger or sadness triggers), or by having a ‘reality check’ on whether the threat is real and what mitigating steps we can take immediately to reduce it (in the case of fear triggers). The second entails, as McRaney suggests, delaying response (just giving it time), using relaxation techniques, or distracting yourself with a peaceful activity. I suspect this second intervention works best for anger triggers and is less effective for fear or sadness triggers.

Neither of these interventions is cathartic. But neither can (in my experience anyway) be invoked quickly enough to prevent the immediate response to the triggered pain — the created stories that explain what happened, and the negative emotions those stories evoke, in a vicious cycle. It’s fine to heal the damage through interventions after it’s happened, but isn’t there any way to prevent the pain responses (stories and negative emotions) from arising in the first place, with all the commensurate damage they can do?

Or is it just natural (and human nature) to react cathartically first and try to heal later? Our our primal “fight-or-flight” selves that badly maladapted to our modern culture and its triggers?

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

A quick re-cap of the hypothesis I laid out in parts one and two of Who ‘We’ Are:

1. The cells and organs of our bodies evolved our brains as a feature-detection, protection and mobility management device for their purposes. Our cells collectively evolved organs and organisms by trying trillions of trillions of random variations, rolls of the genetic dice over four billion years. The evolutions that best adapted to and fit into the ever-changing global environment survived. It can be shown statistically (as Stephen J Gould did in Full House) that such evolutions will tend to produce greater diversity and complexity of life forms, and the human species is a reasonably but not exceptionally complex adaptation compared to the rest of life on Earth.
2. The ‘existence’ of our minds and identities as ‘individuals’ is therefore self-delusion, self-deception, as Stewart and Cohen explain in Figments of Reality and as John Gray reiterates in Straw Dogs. Our minds are nothing more than processes carried out for the benefit of our cells and organs — they are their information processing system, not ‘ours’. The four aspects of our ‘selves’: intellectual, emotional, sensory and intuitive, are simply the four sets of chemical processes that our cells and organs use, and weigh and balance, in making decisions in their collective best interest, as shown in the upper right chart above. To use Stewart and Cohen’s term, we are a complicity, a complex collaborative ‘folding together’ of the collective interests of our component parts. Each individual creature is plural, not singular. This is true for all complex creatures, not just our species.
3. Like most species, we are social creatures. Such creatures evolve codes of behaviour that enable them, as part of the larger organism of all-life-on-Earth, to collaborate, share and keep their numbers in balance with the local ecosystem — these are all evolutionary selected behaviours, since they enable us to adapt and fit well into these ecosystems. These codes of behaviour are called cultures. Cultures are learned rather than genetically innate codes, so they can evolve much faster than our bodies can.
4. In times of stress, due to overcrowding, natural disasters, climate change or the exhaustion of local resources, cultures can intervene to act in adaptive ways that would be unneeded in normal times. These ways can include war and other aggressive and violent behaviour (as scientists have observed in mouse populations under stress). They can also include migration and adoption of new diets, new tools and new ways of living that are better suited in evolutionary terms to the changed environment. At some point, for reasons we don’t know, some of our species chose to leave the trees of the tropical rainforest where we lived a leisurely life as vegetarian gatherers for a million years, and struggle to survive in other environments. We evolved weapons to kill other animals , enabling us to live as carnivores, and discovered (by studying plant growth in floodplains and fire-burned areas) what Richard Manning in Against the Grain calls ‘catastrophic’ agriculture (as opposed to sustainable permaculture), enabling us to live where there was insufficient food growing naturally. These new tools, however, required settlement and a very different kind of culture — civilization culture — to sustain.
5. Civilization culture requires sacrificing a great many freedoms for the survival of the collective membership, and requires vastly more work, personal sacrifice, hardship, suffering, and vulnerability to catastrophe than other cultures. To keep people from obeying their cells’ and organs’ natural tendencies by just walking away from this culture, it is of necessity inherently coercive, using hierarchy, violence, threat of imprisonment, propaganda and other means to ensure ‘law and order’ — obedience and conformity of the group, without which the new civilized settlements would naturally disintegrate. Two key adaptations to enable this were the evolution of abstract language, suitable for the giving of instructions down the hierarchy and the reporting of information back up, and the concept of clock time. None of this is ‘evil’ — its is all just necessary evolutionary adaptation to a changing environment.
6. Whereas our cells and organs had nearly full control of our (their) minds before civilization culture evolved, the new culture was able, through language and coercion, to influence and seize control of a significant part of our minds. There has been a continuing and escalating war for control of our minds ever since. Our culture persuades us that we have ‘free will’ to ignore what our cells and organs impel us to do and instead do what it (our culture) wants us to do — that we have an ego, an identity, and a responsibility to conduct ourselves according to the rules of civilized society, or we must face the social consequences. As Eckhart Tolle explains in his books, the consequence of this great deception is a vicious cycle of egoic mind (fictional stories that our culture has told us are true and ‘factual’) and pain-body (the negative emotions such as anger, fear, guilt, shame and grief that these stories invoke in us). As shown in the illustration above left, the egoic mind and pain-body can be easily triggered by our culture to control or debilitate us, and the resultant psychological illness (which often also manifests as physical illness in the form of chronic stress-related diseases) cripples our ability to be present and at peace in the world. Again, this triggering is not malicious (except when instigated by psychopaths). Our reaction to it is mostly autonomic and beyond our control: We cannot be other than who ‘we’ are.

As I concluded in part two, now that our civilization culture has (as an unintended consequence of its evolution) desolated the Earth, and has begun to collapse, we are left to wonder what will be left of ‘us’, and some of us who believe that culture cannot be ‘saved’ have started to try to liberate ourselves from civilization culture, and our dependence on it, now. I wrote:

This does not mean moving to neo-survival mode, but rather moving away from civilization culture’s broken, desperate, coercive survival mode. Moving from a society whose worldview is one of scarcity, competition, obedience and sacrifice, to one whose worldview is one of abundance, cooperation, independence and generosity. Moving forward to a natural society. One that trusts the wisdom of each individual’s cells, organs, instincts, senses, emotions, intellect, biophilia, to know just what to do, and to act on that holistic wisdom. One that through its connection to all-life-on-Earth intuitively and collectively and wordlessly manages its numbers and behaviour (as most complex natural species do) to contribute to, not destroy, the complexity and diversity of life on our planet. In our cells, in our organs, in our DNA, this is who we are, and who we always have been, except for a few desperate millennia, when we forgot.

In my postscript I mentioned that we can use music and other sensuous stimuli, and love, and perhaps ‘mind-full’ activities such as meditation, gardening etc., to at least temporarily cut through the egoic mind and pain-body that has made us all mentally ill and begin again to function as natural creatures, aware and relaxed, present and at peace, as in the diagram in the upper right. There are many other things we can do as well to liberate ourselves from our crumbling civilization culture:

• Relearn the skills and capacities of community self-sufficiency that will allow us to become less dependent on our fragile, globalized, reeling civilization culture.
• Reconnect with and trust the wisdom of our senses, our instincts, our emotions, our bodies and all-life-on-Earth through personal practices (which will require patience — the disconnections that civilization culture has wreaked on our minds are the result of a lifelong war of propaganda and incapacitation on us and our communities, ostensibly ‘for our own good’).
• Think critically — challenge everything we’re told, turn off the obfuscating media, and recreate local ‘salons’ where people can talk about things that are important again (as opposed to things that are merely urgent, and things that are entertaining and hence distracting) in ways that are re-empowering and community-building

A new thought: The two diagrams above both imply that it is our ‘beliefs’ (what we know or think we know) that drive our behaviours, our actions. I’m now in the process of reading David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, and in this book he argues that it is the opposite: our actions and behaviours inform and determine our beliefs.

What actually happens in our minds, he writes, is that we act first, and then rationalize and self-justify our actions. Our minds don’t ‘decide’ at all. The decision is made for us by our cells and organs, or by our culture, whichever has the upper hand in the moment (or perhaps a mix of both, which can make our behaviour confusing and inconsistent). Whichever has the upper hand is determined by how susceptible we are to (or skeptical we are of) the messages of our culture, and how we understand those messages; by how powerful and clear and trusted the messages our senses and intuition send us are; by how much information we have and how unambiguous that information is; and most of all by which has most influence over the chemicals that are rushing through our bodies in the moment: our cells and organs or the pain-body our culture is triggering in us. ‘We’ have nothing to do with it.

When there is a cognitive dissonance between our behaviour and our beliefs, we attempt to resolve it by adjusting our beliefs, rather than changing our behaviour. Why should this be so? My hypothesis is:

• Our beliefs, conceptions and worldview are simplified models of reality created in our minds. Before the influence of our culture became so pervasive, these were, like upper legislatures were once supposed to be, places where actions could be second-thought, analyzed, assessed for effectiveness. These assessments, ‘stories’ about what happened and why, may be used to prompt overriding or mitigating actions, and to ‘re-mind’ the emotions if that situation occurs again. An excellent adaptation of the brain’s information processing capacities by our cells and organs.
• But now that most of these ‘stories’ are propagated by our culture, not formed from personal body-assessed experience, the egoic mind and pain-body interfere with our natural decision-making process. Our culture can play with us as if we are puppets by triggering the appropriate negative emotions, invoking the appropriate fictional ‘stories’ of what happened and why, and making us behave the way it wants us to. Now we have to reconcile what we have done with what we believe, by altering inconsistencies between our actions and beliefs the only way we can — by changing our beliefs to justify and rationalize our behaviour — so we can ‘live with’ ourselves. Our culture is, of course, delighted with this reinforcement of its message.

So our beliefs and worldview are not a moral or behavioural compass that is used in guiding how we live our lives. On the contrary, our beliefs and worldview are our rationalizations for what we have done and are doing, and why.

This does not require that the arrows in the models depicted above need to be reversed. Who ‘we’ are is not our beliefs or our worldviews. What the models need, to reflect that our behaviours and actions drive our beliefs, is an additional ‘feedback’ arrow from the Decisions and Actions box back to the Intellect box. On the right side, this might be called ‘learning and modelling of reality’. On the left side, it is these things too, but also ‘rationalization and justification’, because when we’re afflicted with egoic mind and pain-body, without rationalization and justification for actions that otherwise make no sense, we cannot live with our ‘selves’.

Why is it important (at least to me) to have some kind of explanation for who ‘we’ are, some model that makes sense of how and what we think and feel and believe and do? I believe self-knowledge is one of the most important and difficult to achieve of the essential capacities we need to acquire to be ready to cope with the challenges we face in the years ahead. I believe our civilization’s collapse has already begun, that it is irreversible and will bring with it an enormous amount of suffering (not that our world isn’t already filled with suffering). How can we hope to be able to deal with the cascading crises of economic, energy and ecological crises likely to roll over us in the Long Emergency decades of this century, if we don’t know ourselves, and our motivations, and if we’re not sufficiently self-aware and present and at peace with ourselves to competently self-manage, deal with crisis, and create healthy, sustainable communities in the aftermath of civilization’s collapse?

I hope this is a useful, or at least interesting, model of ‘self’ for you to think about as you work on building your personal capacities for resilience and your own projects to find better ways to live, now and for the generations to come.

I should have realized that my recent post on Who ‘We’ Are would get me embroiled in a discussion on ‘free will’. So here’s Part Two of this existential rant, to hopefully explore and clear up some of the comments and questions the first article provoked.

In Straw Dogs John Gray writes that “free will is a trick of perspective,” based on the self-delusion that there is “an inner person directing our behaviour.”:

We act in the belief that we are all of one piece, but we are able to cope with things only because we are a succession of fragments. We cannot shake off the sense that we are enduring selves, and yet we know we are not.

These ‘fragments’ that are conceived by our minds are what Stewart and Cohen call “figments (simplified, invented models) — of reality“. Our ‘minds’, they argue, are nothing more than processes that produce these figments (originally for the benefit of our cells’ and organs’ survival, but now, with the increasing power of our culture due to language, also appropriated by our culture).

This is what I was getting at in the previous article when I said that one’s ‘mind’ is a battleground, without any ‘natives’ to defend the territory, where a ceaseless battle rages between the cells and organs of our bodies which evolved our brains as a feature-detection, protection and mobility management device for their purposes, and our culture which uses every available form of propaganda and coercion to try to seize control of our minds for their purposes. As our culture accelerates over the edge of a cliff, these ‘purposes’ are increasingly divergent.

That we have a ‘choice’ between doing what our cells and organs would have us do, and doing what our culture would have us do, hardly constitutes ‘free will’, as humanists would have us believe. It is hard to imagine anything further from ‘freedom’ than to have to make a Sophie’s choice between two irreconcilable alternatives, the choice of either of which will inevitably hurt us, either through damage to our physical and/or mental health, or the angry opprobrium of the well-brainwashed majority in our culture.

In Tolle’s model (above, left), the constant traumas inflicted upon us by our dying, ruthless culture produce a vicious cycle: Our brains invent stories to try to ‘make sense’ of our suffering, and these stories in turn provoke negative emotions (anger, fear, grief etc.), our experience of which reinforces the ‘validity’ of these fictional stories. Many stressful events in our culture (e.g. attacks on us or our loved-ones or our beliefs, bad news about the planet, and a million others) trigger these negative emotions and the stories that we’ve invented to try to make sense of them. Our culture puts its ‘spin’ on each event’s story to pressure us to do its bidding, or to make us believe there is nothing we can do. As a result we are intellectually and emotionally incapacitated, often to the point of chronic mental and physical illness.

So the battle between our biology and our culture for control of our minds (and hence control over our beliefs and actions) is further aggravated by these incapacitating triggers, which take our minds (our intellectual and emotional ‘selves’) hostage. Many of us dissociate, and, in order to try to avoid the triggers, endeavour to live inside our heads, disconnect the four aspects of our ‘selves’ (intellectual, emotional, sensual and intuitive) from each other and from the ‘real’ world, and hide away in a ‘safe’ world of our own making. Except it’s not really our own making: We are really living inside our culturally ‘dis-eased’ mind. This ‘we’ that is doing so is, of course, another fiction — our ego, a cultural construct that exploits a brain that is too smart (and too vulnerable to stress) for its own good. As Gray explains, this ego is just a self-delusion that an inner person is directing our behaviour.

It’s very difficult to shake the delusion that our ego is ‘real’ however, because our culture constantly tells us it is real — and as long as we all believe our egos are ‘real’ we will go on reinforcing that delusion in our every contact with others. The culture tells us that we must take responsibility (as our culture defines responsibility, which in today’s overwrought world is tantamount to self-induced imprisonment and slavery), that we must do what those in power tell us (on threat of punishment), and that we must conform and be like everybody else (or be shunned and ostracized). It also tells most of us that we are sinful, vulnerable and only worth what our culture deems us to be worth.

Inevitably and endlessly our culture fills us with feelings of guilt, fear, shame and self-loathing, and false stories that support these feelings.  When the egoic mind and the ‘pain-body’ (the chronic negative emotions the egoic mind’s stories provoke) churn fast enough, we slide into depression (a form of disengaging from our emotions and thoughts when they become too much to bear), or lash out against others (in personal violence or collective wars), or retreat into paralysis or denial (consumed by fear, or nostalgia, or irrational magical thinking). Our culture knows how to pull the triggers and exploit the ego only too well.

Much has been written about how to ‘realize’ that the egoic mind and pain-body are not real; they are just, as Stewart and Cohen say, ‘figments of reality’ — false models, self-constructed and culturally-reinforced fictions. Even more has been written about how to free ourselves from them.

If we can do so, if we can get rid of the fictional egoic ‘gunk’ that our culture has, throughout our lives, layered on us, our ‘selves’ begin to look more like the ‘present’ self on the right side of the illustration above. With the deception of the ego gone, we are free of the controlling and debilitating effects of culturally-induced triggers. Our senses, instincts, intellects and emotions are reconnected with each other and with the ‘real’ world, and we become healthy and fully functional — that amazing combination of relaxation and awareness that allows us to be fearlessly open to what our instincts, senses, emotions and intellect perceive (not what they conceive, nor what others conceive and urge us to take as ‘true’), and at the same time calm, comfortable and competent to assess what they mean, without bias, judgement or expectation.

In this ‘frame of mind’ we can be both fully present and at peace in the world (the way I believe most wild animals live, most of the time), and able to bring a mindful approach (rather than a reactive one) to each event we face, such as the 7-step process I have tried to use: Sense, self-control, understand, question, imagine, offer, collaborate. The knowledge (instinctive, emotional, sensory and intellectual) we have and can draw on can then be integrated and appropriate actions taken, in the moment.

But if we are just a collection of cells and organs who have evolved a ‘mind’ to create useful (to them) figments (models) of reality, a mind that is, to some extent or other, invaded and controlled by our culture, who, then, is taking these ‘present’ actions?

I would argue that it is our cells and organs, ‘speaking’ to us through our cleared minds. Our senses and instincts are primeval, and the knowledge they convey to us requires no mental model, no ‘figment of reality’. Our minds, when they are as free of cultural baggage as possible, use our instincts’ and senses’ knowledge to decide on actions that are in our cells’ and organs’ interest. These need not be selfish actions — our bodies are ‘smart’ enough (consider e.g. the urge to procreate, to socialize, and to nurture) to act in concert with others in the greater good of all-life-on-Earth, which they (we) instinctively appreciate — our biophilia is innate, an evolutionary prime directive in our genes, at least when this biophilia is not overridden by the nature-fearing stories of our culture.

Our cells and organs prompt us in integrating this knowledge by producing chemicals that evoke strong emotions (in the natural world these are mostly positive, except in fight-or-flight situations) to goad us into appropriate behaviours.

Our culture is of no help at all in this process. In ‘less-civilized’, healthy societies the culture of the people rarely interferes to compel its members to act against their cells’ and organs’ interests. Individuals in such societies are trusted to make their own decisions, without coercion; the purpose of the culture is to provide objective knowledge through stories, not to advise.

So what’s wrong with our ‘civilized’ culture, that it has so overstepped its bounds of helpfulness, and now tries to control ‘us’ to the point we are mostly ill, disconnected, imprisoned, and dysfunctional?

My guess is that our culture became, as a consequence of our own inventiveness, perverted, deranged, cancerous. When our species faced crises that threatened our existence, our response was to invent the arrowhead, and then agriculture, and then settlement — ‘civilization’. Without these inventions we might not have survived the ice ages — earlier rounds of severe climate change.

But these new inventions required a great deal more interdependence and associations much larger than tribes — the bigger the better. We naturally did not take to the constraints such interdependence and scale required — hierarchy, conformity, obedience, settlement, dependence on fragile human systems, and suffering with plagues, famines and violence, all consequences of living in unnaturally large numbers in close quarters. Our culture, which as ‘software’ can evolve must faster than our cells’ and organs’ ‘hardware’, adapted quickly to the need to enforce compliance and uniformity. Language was its most powerful tool. As civilization ratcheted up to 100 million people, and then a billion, and now seven billion, the culture has needed to restrict personal ‘choices’ and freedoms more and more. It had to get inside our heads and control us, from birth, put us in thrall to civilization culture to keep us in line, keep fuelling the culture. And that’s where we are today — like lab rats starved of food, beginning to eat our own young.

The libertarian-anarchist streak in many of us is producing a now-futile yearning to be free from civilization’s control. But our civilization is collapsing, and as it does survival will depend on our ability to reconnect, to be present and at peace — to be nobody-but-ourselves, feral, social in a collaborative and diverse way, not in civilization culture’s coercive and homogeneous way.

I sense that this is what those who have moved past the Second Denial are now trying to do. We are trying to simultaneously unplug from civilization culture’s thrall (freeing ourselves from the egoic mind and pain-body) and reconnect to the larger ‘organ’/society of all-life-on-Earth, whose voice has been all but drowned out by civilization’s noise.

This does not mean moving to neo-survival mode, but rather moving away from civilization culture’s broken, desperate, coercive survival mode. Moving from a society whose worldview is one of scarcity, competition, obedience and sacrifice, to one whose worldview is one of abundance, cooperation, independence and generosity. Moving forward to a natural society. One that trusts the wisdom of each individual’s cells, organs, instincts, senses, emotions, intellect, biophilia, to know just what to do, and to act on that holistic wisdom. One that through its connection to all-life-on-Earth intuitively and collectively and wordlessly manages its numbers and behaviour (as most complex natural species do) to contribute to, not destroy, the complexity and diversity of life on our planet. In our cells, in our organs, in our DNA, this is who we are, and who we always have been, except for a few desperate millennia, when we forgot.

.     .     .     .     .

Postscript: When I wrote the earlier post arguing that we have no identity, that there is no inner person directing our behaviour, a couple of respondents asked me: What about music? If there is no ‘me’, who/what is it that responds so viscerally and rapturously to great music — even if that music has no words?

My tentative answer to this is that music cuts through the ‘gunk’ of our egoic mind and pain-body, kind of like how a dishwashing detergent cuts through grease. It doesn’t get rid of it, it just makes it seem to disappear for a while, gets it out of the way. Music goes right to our emotions, and I think it may short-circuit the vicious cycle that connects our egoic mind (those ghastly fictitious stories) and our pain-body (the negative emotions that these stories evoke). The direct connection temporarily cuts off the stories and stops the vicious cycle. The result can be an amazing feeling of relief, calmness, awareness. When my depression is at its worst, I know when I begin to respond to music that it’s lifting. This is when I cry, and it’s wonderful.

There are other ‘sensations’ that likewise seem to cut through and cut off the egoic-mind/pain-body connection. While I’m sure they are different for everyone, for me they are:

• lights and/or sounds in the darkness — the moon, streetlights, rain, the night calls of birds and animals, fragrant breezes, storms etc.
• falling in love
• poetry — especially brief, powerful, lyrical turns of phrase that directly call up an emotion or paint a picture
• playing with animals
• being in hot water — hot tubs, baths, even showers, seem to liberate my mind from intellectual constraints and stimulate my imagination
• sometimes, movement — being in a gently moving vehicle that I’m not driving

There is something about all these experiences that accentuates the sensual, relaxes and stimulates at the same time. The senses and instincts take over and then appeal directly to the emotions or the intellect. For a short while, I am ‘cured’ of the suffering and dysfunction in the upper left diagram, and able to function in the healthy way depicted in the upper right diagram; freed briefly from the suffocating ‘dis-ease’ of our culture.

If there is a consensus in the responses I have received to my recent posts about being unhappy and ‘un-present‘, I think it would be:

• I should be grateful (and ‘get over myself’)
• I should stop thinking so much and just be
• I should act (do what my instincts tell me ‘needs’ to be done) and those actions will resolve my unhappiness and lack of presence (along these lines, this fascinating article asserts our actions drive our beliefs — what we do determines who we are — rather than the other way around)

We are, I believe, products of both (a) our biology (‘we’ are a collection, a complicity, of cells and organs in a watery sack, cells and organs that together evolved our minds, our ‘consciousness’, as a feature-detection, protection and mobility management device for their — our organs’ — benefit) and (b) our culture (we are ‘each’ a part of an evolving society, a larger organism, self-organized for our collective survival). Both ‘we’s’ are extraordinarily complex, beyond more than rudimentary knowing, so we flounder around, pushed in often different directions by our biological selves and our cultural selves, profoundly un-self-aware and profoundly ‘alone’.

We have, arguably, no identity — there is no ‘us’ other than our constituent organs (whose consciousness and knowledge are largely unfathomable to our ‘minds’) and the self-delusion of ourselves as ‘individuals’ which has been created and ‘taught’ to us by our culture (through its propaganda tool, language) for their collective purpose. Our cells and organs, our microcosmic selves-as-collection, are in a relentless war with our culture, our macrocosmic selves-as-part, and the battleground is our minds. We might see ourselves as being at the mercy of two colonizing forces, one that created our minds for its purposes and the other trying endlessly to co-opt our minds for its purposes. Except that there is no ‘ourselves’ to be colonized. The suffering and weary terrain of our minds has no natives. There is no ‘us’ to take sides in this battle. We are, as I keep saying, just the space through which stuff (chemicals, information, ideas) passes.

I don’t mean this post to be about the existence, or not, of free will. I am trying to get at something more profound, about the non-existence of identity. When we fall in love, when we crave, or nurture, or erupt, or laugh, or cry, or cower, or mourn, we are doing our biology’s carefully-selected bidding — our cells and organs count on ‘us’ doing these things, for their health and survival, so they flush our minds so full of powerful chemicals that we can do nothing else. When we join others, in war, in celebration, in protest, in recreation, in obedience, in activism, in outrage, in conversation, in solidarity, in community, and especially in acceptance of our social situation, social norms and worldviews, we are doing our culture’s carefully-programmed bidding — our civilization counts on us doing these things, for its health and survival.

When the imperatives of our biology (“go hit on that beautiful creature over there”) and those of our culture (“unfaithfulness to one’s partner — and you can only have one partner –  is a sin with ghastly consequences”) are in conflict, we feel obliged (and empowered) to make a ‘choice’ which to obey. But it is hardly a choice — ‘we’ are in truth merely spectators of the conflict, and they will determine the winner.

When my cells and organs have decided it is in their interest for me to make a bond with someone, they stimulate my imagination to create a fiction in my mind of who that person ‘is’, what they are feeling, and what my relationship with them is or could or should be, that cannot possibly be real, since no one can ‘know’ what it is to be another person. The two of us act out a script, more or less mindlessly, that has been written by our respective bodies, in testosterone and oxytocin and other colourful inks, with characters and plot sufficiently delicious to make us enjoy the performance, and hopefully to enchant us to repeat it, at least until it gets boring and a change of cast is called for.

Likewise our culture uses us, brainwashing us from birth into believing that we have rights within and responsibilities to that culture, and that the way it dictates we live our lives is the only way to live, until we lose awareness that we have given up our freedom (in order to continue at a scale of 7 billion, our culture must now dictate and micromanage our every behaviour) and our health (our bodies are not evolved to cope with civilization’s endless and intense anxiety, so stress-catalyzed chronic physical and mental illnesses are epidemic). And in the process, we have mindlessly desolated our planet and precipitated a sixth great extinction of life on it.

Why has our culture done this to us? As I have written before, I think it is because we became too smart for our own good. Much of what civilization has wrought is an unintended consequence of the evolution of the human brain to the point that our inventions and technologies outpaced our ability to come to grips with their consequences, and to the point that we fell under the thrall of the imagined world inside our heads and others’ ability to manipulate that world, until we became, as ee cummings put it, “everybody-else” — the tide in the war between our biology and our culture shifted inexorably in favour of the latter. Once we became ‘smart’ enough to realize at an existential level that we were completely, utterly alone, we were even more willing recruits to the side of our culture, which comforts us with the illusion that we are not.

So now, retired, with a comfortable pension, free of debts and obligations, living by myself on top of a hill on a staggeringly beautiful island, I am free, at last, to spend the time to contemplate what all this means. To strip off the mask and belief systems and worldview and other gunk that my culture covered me over with for more than fifty years and told me was ‘me’ and stand naked, feral, unencumbered. To stand outside my biological self, still preoccupied with creature comforts and its self-induced chemical addictions. To stand outside my cultural self, so long preoccupied with the carefully-crafted fictions about my ‘self’ and the past and the future and how to behave.

And to realize that, outside of these two warring tyrant ‘selves’, there is no ‘me’. No volition. no ego, no identity, no purpose. Just space.

When I first experienced this ‘spacey’ feeling I feared it was disconnection, which is often, for me, a precursor to depression. But I’m starting to realize that it’s not disconnection from all-life-on-Earth, but from civilization culture, and it’s not disengagement, it’s re-engagement, liberation. It’s just very new to me, and not a little scary. I don’t know what to do with my ‘self’. I am meditating, taking yoga, and spending as much time as possible language-free (no talking or listening or reading or writing). I am listening to, and writing, songs without words. I am spending time in nature trying to just be, to accept what is, to let go, to really see and sense and feel. Raw.

When I am with people, now, even people I love, I am impatient. I don’t want to behave in a ‘civilized’ way anymore. I don’t want to talk at all. I don’t want to care about how others have been trapped by civilization culture, and the terrible minutiae and infinite suffering of their lives — I don’t believe in ‘saving’ people, and recognize (at last) that it is up to them to liberate themselves. I just want to ‘be’ with people who just ‘are’ themselves. Uncivilized. Primal. Wild. In the hope that, in their presence, we can learn together how to be nobody-but-ourselves.

I sit here, naked, on the deck, on the hill, staring up at the moon. Rachmaninoff playing in the background, and the sound of owls in the dark in the nearby trees. Breathing. Letting go. Dissipating, falling apart, crying, howling, becoming part of all-life-on-Earth, which calls me, always, quietly, home.

In my ongoing search for ways to become more Present, I’ve been researching a variety of practices. I recognize that this will not be an easy journey, and whatever practices I pursue could take years, so I’m looking to narrow the list to several paths that (a) will show some early success, so I know I’m on a promising path at least and (b) are activities I enjoy rather than finding onerous.

To me, Presence is what happens when I’m keenly aware of all four aspects of my identity — intellectual, emotional, sensual and instinctual — and when they are in balance, integrated, whole, under control. When I’m present I feel at once aware and relaxed. When I’m truly present, I am “just the space through which stuff passes, touching the right stuff in just the right way as it passes through”, and I approach each moment and situation using this process:

The intellectual and emotional “me”, the product of my culture, is, alas, most of the time disconnected from the instinctual and sensual “me”, the product of my biology. I suppose this is the classical mind/body disconnect. These two “selves” manifest within me and to the world differently, and drive me in different directions:

So my “Presence” challenge is to bring these two “selves” together and get the four aspects of my identity working in concert. Here are some of the practices I am thinking about trying, to do this:

1. No-language week (or two): Spending a week or two at home, without reading or writing anything, without listening to or saying any words. I can do this by stocking up on foods and using only recipes I’ve committed to heart (or eating raw); and by turning off the phone and the laptop, and turning the iPhone on only to play playlists of preselected instrumental music. I rarely get surprise visitors, and the neighbours are far enough away I can’t overhear conversations. And I can still go for runs and walks in the forest, where I rarely encounter others. It would be interesting to try doing this with someone else, but I suspect it will be a solitary adventure. I’ve read about people who have done this, outside of any religious context, and it appears to have brought them a heightened awareness of their senses, emotions and instincts. After a while, they stopped “talking to themselves” and began to think differently, more expansively, in ways not constrained or defined by language.
2. Yoga / meditation: I have tried both, but have persevered with neither. Time to give them another chance. Possibly Vinyasa yoga this time, since it might complement mindfulness meditation due to the attention of both on the breath.
3. Therapy: I took a course in co-counselling this year, and acknowledge that, like everyone else, I need to heal myself from the damage that the civilized world has inflicted on me. But as a phenomenologist philosophically I am inclined to seek more existential (and perhaps less orthodox) approaches to therapy than the currently popular ones.
4. Self-acceptance: As a complement to the above, I think it would be beneficial for me to spend time just acknowledging (and learning more about) who I am, including an awareness of what my capacities and incapacities are, my motivations, and what actions (if you can follow the chart at the top of this post) I am and am not likely to take — what is and is not in my ‘nature’. And just accepting that, without self-judgement or attempts to change it. I have learned a lot about myself in the last decade; the wisdom to realize that seeking ‘self-improvement’ is sheer folly is taking longer.

The purpose of pursuing these four practices is not to change or better myself, but to know and be myself, so that the actions that I am naturally inclined and capable of taking will be more mindful, more competent, and more effective. What those actions will be remains to be seen.

[Thanks to the many readers who have suggested some approaches to the above, and other practices. I read and appreciate all suggestions, ideas and comments, particularly when my blog posts get, as they tend to do from time to time, a bit self-preoccupied. I feel as if I am getting ready for something, some major transition, but I have no idea what it will be.]

chart showing the body’s chemical and neurological activity when it feels love (as best we know), explained in my earlier posts on the chemistry of love

I am unhappy. I feel somewhat ashamed admitting this. Most of the people in the world would give anything to have what I have — good health, physical and financial comfort and security, love, a beautiful home environment, and a stimulating intellectual life. I have always been incredibly fortunate, the world’s most blessed agnostic.

Yet I am unhappy. The times when I have been happy recently have been times when my profound pessimism about the state of the world, my chronic sense of grief and anger about what humankind has done to this planet and the resultant massive suffering of all Earth’s creatures, are overwhelmed by the chemisty of new emotional and erotic love, the rush of ocytocin and phenylethylamine and dopamine and norepinephrine and testosterone. Once that rush is over, and all that’s left is the quiet comfort of endorphins of enduring love, that apparent happiness subsides, I crave new love, and I once again become unhappy.

Except that now that I am aware of this crazy addiction to the self-produced chemicals of new love, it is losing its hold over me. I want the chemical rush without the addiction, without the madness of pursuing and involving ever-more new people in my emotional life. I want the joy of new love without the loss of self-control, without the complications and the responsibility and the demands on my time and energies that come with the attachments of love.

Yes, I do get some happiness from aesthetic and sensual and intellectual love — when I listen to good music, when I play with animals (or play, in general), when I am exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking, and when something, late at night, usually connected with water, or wind, or light, or the sounds of wild creatures, stirs my heart. But these times are hard to come by, and they are transient. I don’t know what chemical or neurological responses these experiences set off in me that fills me with aesthetic delight, sensual pleasure and intellectual appreciation, but they lack the power of the cocktail of new emotional and erotic love.

I want more fun in my life. And I want my life to be, at last, easy. I have retired from paid work and I don’t want to work hard at anything any more. After 18 months free of wage-slave work, I am still exhausted. I still prefer to do nothing. But when I do nothing I feel empty, disconnected, not alive at all.

And I am quietly consumed with fear — of loss, of extreme discomfort, of getting hurt, of getting trapped, of getting depressed, of hurting people, of letting people down, letting the world down, letting myself down.

I have undertaken and been involved with several projects over the past 18 months, but I don’t feel my involvement has produced anything of real value, and I have largely disengaged from them. I haven’t found any new projects that are sufficiently imperative to me, or sufficiently fun, or sufficiently easy, that I’m motivated to take them up. There are lots of projects that need doing that I think I could contribute to, but I have no passion for them, or else I am afraid — of failure, of arrest, of losing interest in them before I’ve done what needs to be done. And there are many things I think I would be wise to learn, and to practice, in order to be more useful, or more balanced, or more resilient, but I have no patience for studying and practicing them.

I think I know myself well, better than I ever have, yet I feel that there is something wrong and I don’t know what it is. And I don’t know what to do about it. I am such a slow learner, and so self-unaware in the moment.

My sense is that my unhappiness is rooted in the cultural indoctrination that has so profoundly clouded the way I see everything, so wrenched me out of my natural self and into this place inside my head, coloured by everybody-else’s way of thinking, that I can no longer see things as they really are (wondrous, beautiful, spontaneous, connected, ever-present, boundaryless, joyful, abundant, eternal and vibrant) and instead am burdened with perceiving everything the way the disconnected human mind and civilized human culture see things (fearsome, urgent, hostile, full of evil and unfairness and error that must be vigorously and endlessly corrected and self-corrected and improved, controllable with sufficient effort, dangerous, full of struggle and scarcity, endlessly stressful, inherently tragic, and of course anthropocentric).

My instincts tell me that to be truly and sustainably happy I will have to learn to get outside my self-polluted and culturally-polluted head and re-learn to be a natural creature, to be at once nobody-but-myself and a connected part of all-life-on-Earth.

In this, my instincts, which I trust, are at odds with my mind and body, which are tired and unwilling to keep trying to break through this cultural conditioning, to rid myself of the lifetime of gunk that other people and my own contaminated sense-making process have covered me with, the stuff that keeps me everybody-else instead of nobody-but-myself.

But I’m girding myself up to try again, to practice until I learn to slow down and silence the noise in my head and just be, present, self-aware, Earth-aware (drawing on the larger, real context for making sense of life and what happens). More comfortable in wild places. And more play-full (in forms of play that are less earnest and less escapist and less cathartic, and more joyful).

I think this will entail me becoming a bit more self-indulgent, self-centred, less self-sacrificing and less busy, not in the sense of being less generous but rather in the sense of liberating myself from the influences of our terrible culture so that I can connect more with people as they truly are. So instead of getting caught up in their anxieties and cultural indoctrination I will be able to be connect with them as fellow feral creatures, and help them in their liberation instead of with the malaises that have resulted from their captivity.

I am not sure this makes sense, and I am not sure it will make me more sustainably happy. I’m not even sure I’m ready to try it and to persevere. But it seems to offer more promise than an unhappy cycle of love addiction and love-sickness.

consensus process flowchart by tree bressen

For the most part, I would argue, our industrial civilization culture has given up on allowing groups to make decisions. In business, decisions are mostly made by individuals at the top of the hierarchy authorized to make them. Voting is rare, and usually a sham to enforce compliance with decisions already made. Boards of Directors ostensibly make decisions based on group consensus, but my experience is that the decisions they have to make are rarely contentious, and when they are (e.g. firing the CEO, setting top executive salaries) Directors rely on outside ‘experts’ to recommend a narrow set of alternatives to them. Wise ‘expert’ consultants know to provide cues as to the preferred alternative so that the group is led to make the “right” decision.

Political decisions are left up to individuals to make by plurality vote, which usually leads to results that are either dysfunctional or inconsequential — rarely is any real choice left to such a chancy process. Hegemony ensures that the two or three alternative groups up for selection really decide among themselves, aided and abetted by money from contributors who want to sway the results, and by a complacent media attuned to the false and simplistic “choices” of consumerism.

In our families and other local social circles, decisions are usually made by one or two dominant individuals, who bully the rest to either comply or leave the group. Most of us never learn that there is another process for group decision-making — consensus.

The consensus process is agreement-seeking (give everyone a result they are satisfied with), collaborative (appreciative and interactive), non-adversarial, egalitarian (no power politics), altruistic (seeking the best resolution for the whole over personal interest) and inclusive (everyone participates and is genuinely heard). Tree Bressen’s consensus process is illustrated above. The idea is to enable and encourage the full wisdom of the group to be heard, and agreement on a best course of action to emerge from the discussion. A good facilitator can help guide this process, avoid inappropriate behaviours that can prevent consensus from emerging, and articulate the consensus when it has been achieved. I’ve written before about the obvious benefits of this approach (including creativity, greater insight, group cohesion, and better implementation) over the usual decision-making methods of hierarchical fiat, coercion, majority/plurality rule, and even the ‘free’ market (since ‘free’ markets don’t really exist).

Consensus works whenever there is substantive agreement in principle among the group, and, more importantly, it works when there is an informed lack of agreement plus a genuine collective interest in achieving such agreement. If some members have already made the decision by fiat, or are inclined to use power politics and coercion to get compliance with their wishes, or are content with majority/plurality rule or the ‘free’ market to make the decision, there will be no collective interest in achieving consensus. You have probably witnessed this a thousand times in your workplace and other groups you belong to. Consensus is hard, time-consuming work, especially since in our modern culture we are so unpractised at it.

Likewise, if disagreements are ideological rather than based on different information, ideas and understandings, consensus may not work. As the decision chart above shows, it depends on what aspects of participants’ ideologies the differences lie in. Our ideologies and belief sets help determine our values — what we think is important, urgent or ‘right’ to do in the world — and hence what decisions and actions we’re open to.

If the differences lie in the more malleable parts of our ideologies — beliefs in what is possible or what is really happening — it may be possible to bridge the differences through the telling of stories that allow the participants to grasp how a difference of perception of the current reality or future possibilities has arisen. For example, a story about the struggle of endangered species of 400 million year old turtles, or a story about how a group of young people successfully persuaded a megapolluter to clean up its act, might appeal to a climate change denier sufficiently to achieve consensus on the need for a carbon tax, when otherwise the denier would be resistant to the idea because s/he conflates it with a belief set that is in deep conflict with her/his own. Stories are subversive — they allow different ways of seeing to to be appreciated without going through the normal filters of our established worldview and beliefs.

On the other hand, if the differences lie in more intransigent parts of our ideologies — our beliefs in the essential nature of human beings and our inherent motivations, or our beliefs in why something is happening (rather than what is happening), then stories and other bridging mechanisms are unlikely to work, and attempts at consensus are likely to be futile. A conservative who believes we are inherently sinful and vulnerable to evil will probably never agree with a liberal who believes we are inherently good and well-intentioned, when it comes to an issue like, say, safe drug injection sites or legalizing prostitution.

There is another situation when consensus is unlikely to work: When the degree of change needed to achieve the goal is necessarily radical. It is in our nature to be resistant to change, and, while change is possible when there is agreement on its urgency or importance, or when the change is easy or fun to make, the more drastic the change needed, the more reluctant people are to agree to it. I have seen too many occasions when a consensus-seeking group opted, after exhaustive discussion, for a decision that was too modest to achieve the needed result, because getting the whole group to agree even in substance on radical change was just impossible. This is particularly true in businesses faced with change-or-die situations: groupthink seems to set in, with the participants trying to reassure each other and persuading themselves to stay the course, usually with tragic results.

As the crises we face in our world become more pervasive, frequent and intractable, there would seem to be a growing willingness to set aside the old, non-consensual decision methods, and to set aside some aspects of our entrenched ideologies, and try something new. The opportunities for using consensus to make better decisions than those we make today are limitless, especially as we get better at the practice. We just need to be aware of the situations where consensus is the most intelligent approach, and when it is not.

I want to learn to meditate. More than that, I want to learn presence, the art of being in the moment, aware, relaxed, attentive, competently and appropriately responsive and adaptive, taking everything in intellectually, emotionally, sensuously, and instinctively, collecting, engaging others, letting things come, challenging, playing imaginatively and creatively with them, reflecting, understanding, synthesizing, integrating, acting responsibly and passionately, and letting go of what I cannot change or control. I think this is an essential competency, and I suck at it. I’m unintentionally inattentive and insensitive, and I have a terrible memory.

I am a great belief in self-directed learning — that, with sufficient self-knowledge, we are vastly better off deciding personally when, what and how to learn, and learning our own way at our own pace, than relying on education systems and processes that inflict a one-size-fits-all process that presumes what we should know and how we should best learn it. Most of that self-directed learning is solitary (though a mentor might be selected to bounce questions and ideas off).

I am also a great believer in on-line learning, since the essentially infinite resources of the web are vaster in breadth, depth and media than any preset course or curriculum taught in a classroom could ever hope to match.

But I’m learning that there are limits to what you can learn online, and what you can learn alone, even if your research and self-directed learning skills are exemplary. For example I have tried a dozen self-paced, self-directed ways to learn to meditate, from books, recordings and even a few real-time mentored telephone and face-to-face instructional sessions (thanks in particular to Indigo Ocean). Still, I cannot meditate.

I have come up with several excuses for this:

• I have taken hands-on courses in swimming, dancing and playing musical instruments, and haven’t learned from them either, so perhaps the problem isn’t that I’m trying to learn meditation online, it’s just that I’m hopelessly uncoordinated.
• I haven’t practiced much. There is a substantial consensus that learning difficult skills like meditation often only occurs with lots and lots of practice. So perhaps the problem is lack of practice, combined with lack of patience.
• There are limits to what anyone can learn, period. Perhaps with meditation I’ve just pressed up against another of those limits.

But I find these excuses unconvincing.

I’m wondering whether some critical skills and capacities are far better learned face-to-face, real-time, in a group. We often learn well from observing others doing and learning. And it seems almost ludicrous to think that essential skills like collaboration, empathy, mentoring and facilitation could possibly be learned online or alone, no matter how brilliant the simulation of others’ presence the Internet or self-paced learning exercises and case studies might provide.

My friend Raffi asked me the other day if I think I can really learn to meditate without a real-time, real-space ‘expert’ teacher. Reluctantly, I’m beginning to think the answer is no.

We all learn differently, of course, and for each individual there is a need for different types of learning to acquire different knowledge, skills and capacities. The chart above summarizes everything I’ve learned over the years about learning styles, along with a few really outrageous generalizations. I have always aspired to learn naturally (the left-side choices in the table above). However, thanks to my upbringing, my learning style might more accurately be labelled Old Liberal Male learning style.

Most of my actual, meaningful, useful learning (none of it in educational institutions) has come from either (a) solo research and study (mostly online) or (b) conversation and collaboration with people in real time and space (mostly working on real, long-term, important projects). I find (a) easy and fun, and I’m good at it. I find (b) arduous, and I’m terrible at it. I talk a good story about the value and importance of stories, learning-by-doing, empathy, learning from mistakes, facilitation, conversation and collaboration in community, and I really believe it, but if you want someone with skills in any of these areas, you had best look elsewhere.

Hence I am constantly bumping up against the limits of what one can learn alone and online. Here’s a controversial list of things I believe you can’t learn (very well) alone and online (or from books for that matter, since they’re more or less all online now):

1. The social skills and capacities of getting along well and effectively with others (e.g. empathy, facilitation, conversation, collaborative skills, consensus, invitation, conflict resolution, improvisation, elicitation, story-telling).
2. The wisdom of crowds (it’s just too hard to organize group brainstorming, focused knowledge-sharing, and Open-Space style creative interactions online).
3. Anything about human nature.
4. To really know yourself.
5. Most self-sufficiency and survival skills.
6. What you’re meant to do in this world, and with whom.
7. How to be more truly yourself (e.g. generosity, vulnerability, taking responsibility, caring, drawing on instinct, intentionality, adaptation, resilience).
8. How to really play.
9. How to make a living for yourself.
10. Competencies and capacities that require real-world practice (e.g. meditation, being present, languages, physical recreations and sports, dealing with illnesses and traumas, self-management, acceptance, and a host of technical skills).

This is an important list, and it’s just off the top of my head. What’s even more annoying is that learning a lot of these things doesn’t lend itself well to natural (or Old Liberal Male) learning styles.

So if I’m serious about learning to meditate and become present, not only am I going to have to turn off the computer and get with other people in real space and time, I’m going to have to try a new style. I may have to be perseverant and studious, learn to accept and follow instruction, follow a prescribed curriculum, get results-orient, and practice, a lot, even when it’s no fun. Ugh. Do I really want to learn this that badly?

That’s really what it comes down to, when push comes to shove on difficult learning. Pollard’s Law states: We do what we must (what we ‘have’ to do, our personal imperatives), then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. For me at least, learning meditation and presence is not going to be easy or fun. Is it enough of a personal imperative that I ‘must’ learn it, or will I fall back into the habit of doing things that are easy and fun instead?

The answer to that question is depressingly obvious. Things are the way they are for a reason. I have the time to learn these things, and I know I want to learn them, but I’m not doing it. Same applies to a lot of the things I think I want to do. Instead, I’m learning about and playing with Google+, online and alone (easy and fun). I know my limits.

Salon.com has been running a series of articles by Tracy Clark-Flory on monogamy, prompted in part by a New York Times Review article that quizzed sexpert Dan Savage about the Weiner affair, and in part on the seemingly endless list of celebrity infidelity scandals. The first Salon article interviewed marriage historian Stephanie Coontz on how monogamy has evolved (basically, from an arranged economic compact to a personal commitment based on romantic love). The second article interviews cultural anthropologist Judith Stacey, author of the book Unhitched, on the world’s non-monogamous cultures.

I wrote a review a few years ago of  Laura Kipnis’ wonderful book Against Love, in which she argues that monogamy is unnatural and unhealthy, and possibly complicit in our emotional detachment from political life and our ecosystem as well. Kipnis sees monogamy as part of the cultural indoctrination that leads to wage slavery and mindless consumerism — it’s all about creating scarcity (in this case, scarcity of love and sex) to drive up the ‘value’ of both, and hence needlessly drive up the hunger, desperation and jealousy (and, alas, resultant domestic violence) of so many in their anguished search for them. And ultimately, it’s all about creating a ‘consumer’ populace that is (financially and emotionally) endlessly needy, unsatisfied, and wanting more, that can be exploited and oppressed.

The problem with the pontifications of Savage, Coontz and Stacey is that they all seem to equate monogamy with sexual fidelity to a single partner. Mark Oppenheimer, who interviewed Savage, notes:

What if a woman, or a man for that matter, looks outside marriage for the other emotional satisfactions that come along with sex? Savage has less to offer that person. He does not tell people to take long-term boyfriends or girlfriends. He is skeptical that group marriages, of three or more partners, can last very long. Nor could he have much to offer the person who feels a partner ought to constrain his urges. There is a reason that sex advice is easier to give than relationship advice. Satisfying a sexual yearning is easier than satisfying a hole in your life.

It’s pretty clear that a lot of ‘infidelity’ in monogamous relationships is in search of something other than sexual excitement or variety. The whole argument behind polyamory is that it is unreasonable to expect any one person to fulfill all your life’s desires (social, intellectual, emotional, financial, physical, and sexual). The “marriage is hard work” mantra that we are inculcated with in our culture calls on us to stifle our desires, suppress our impulses and disappointments, and accept our one partner for who s/he is and what s/he can offer us — in other words, to settle for less. Anthropologists have concluded that such settling is unnatural, and that is why the chemistry of love binds us to a single partner only for a brief period sufficient to produce offspring and ensure they are sufficiently provided for until they are weaned.

In my review of Against Love I speculated idealistically about the emergence of a new polyamory society within our culture, one that in retrospect sounds very much like the Mosuo culture in northwest China described in glowing terms in Unhitched. This is what I imagined:

A lot of people, some of their own free will, and many more who have been pushed, have recently broken free of wage slavery and are now working, mostly for much less income, for themselves. That’s probably a good thing in many ways — it reduces the supply of the remaining wage slaves, which might actually, in time, allow them to bargain from a position of at least a bit of power. It increases self-sufficiency. It reduces excessive consumption. What if there were a similar revolution against marriage slavery? What if a whole generation just refused to define themselves (in more ways than one) as married, or to live with the constraints of monogamy, and instead opted for a polyamory life-style?

Paternity ‘rights’ and responsibilities would both probably suffer, as the new family unit would be a woman (or possibly, and more logically, a group of women, in self-selected community) and their children. They would have the power, and could strike whatever contract they chose with males who wanted the responsibilities and privileges of fatherhood. The nuclear family and the ‘single-family dwelling’ would disappear. Conjugal relations would not attach to parental responsibility, and could be negotiated between any two people as individuals on a one-shot basis, with no responsibility other than the responsibility to prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease. This would probably be bad for the oldest profession, as the supply/demand ratio for quick couplings would soar. Jealousy and the consequent domestic violence that is the scourge of our nuclear spouse-as-property society would, slowly (old habits die hard), disappear. I think the vast majority of men, driven by million-year-old biological imperatives, once they reached a certain age, would choose to attach themselves to one of the matriarchal communities (if so invited), and would do their share to provide for its well-being, in return for the company and sense of purpose that would bring.

Since my marriage ended three years ago I have opted for polyamory, not for any ideological reasons as much as because I enjoyed “playing the field” in my youth and see no reason why I should not do so again, having lived monogamously, faithfully and responsibly, for the better part of three decades. Poly just works for me, and makes sense to me. I am much better at it now than I was thirty years ago, I think: I am more knowledgeable about who I am and hence can be far more honest about what I seek and what I offer in loving relationships. I am much fussier about who I love, and can’t envision trying to juggle more than two or three relationships.

I’ve actually found I’m quite willing to make a (non-monogamous) commitment to those I love, and I think I’m a lot more generous than I used to be in what I’m willing to offer. What is critical to me is that my relationships be mutually healthy and happy (and it’s my intention that, if and as long as they are, they be lifelong), and that they leave enough room (time and space) for me to be alone, since I’ve discovered I really like, and perhaps even need, time alone in warm, natural, beautiful places.

This got me thinking about, if we were to shift our society from a scarce-love monogamous one to an abundant-love polyamorous one (not that everyone would have to be poly in such a society, just that it would be equally acceptable as, and probably more popular than, monogamy), what would people look for in an ideal poly partner?

I think the list would be very different from the list of qualities for an ideal monogamy partner, mostly because love in a world of abundance is very different from love in a world of scarcity. Our modern love-scarce world, I think, is due partly to social and cultural conditioning (what we ‘learn’ from experience about love, from infancy to adulthood), and partly to the enforced busyness of our lives, which leaves a scarcity of time for everything, including love.

Based on my own experience with both, and on a superficial review of some sites that suggest what these qualities might be, here is my list, in approximate order, of the (somewhat overlapping) qualities that would seem to make an ideal partner:

Not much doubt which I’m better suited for. It just took me most of my life to figure that out.

It was the writing of Glenn Parton that first got me thinking about love as (in modern monogamist society) a commercialized, scarce-ified resource. When I discovered polyamory, it was liberating — I had not thought that there was an alternative to monogamism. And then it occurred to me that our way of thinking about love is analogous to the way we think about everything in our society: from a worldview of scarcity, competition, jealousy/envy, and insecurity.

Perhaps if we can start to liberate our thinking about what is possible by discovering that love is abundant, if we want it to be, we might then be able to realize that everything in our society and economy is abundant, if we want it to be. If we choose to stop competing, to stop working for, voting for, paying taxes to, listening to, buying from, and otherwise supporting corporatists, then we might liberate ourselves from corporatism the same way we liberate ourselves from monogamism — by just rejecting it, and choosing another way to live. I’ve called this the Generosity Economy, but it’s commonly called the Gift Economy. It’s an economy — and in fact a whole set of systems: social, political, economic, technological, health, educational, etc. — based on abundance and self-sufficiency. And the only thing holding us back from realizing them is our false belief, instilled through centuries of propaganda, that the only way to live is a life of scarcity and struggle.

Such a realization, if acted upon, would not only make us much happier, and less driven by stress, it would dramatically reduce our impact on the environment and greatly increase our resilience in the face of the crises we will have to face in the coming century — crises not of scarcity, but of the consequences of believing for far too long that a society driven by anxiety about scarcity and the endless need for more is the only way to live.

Cartoon: By Peter Steiner from The New Yorker, in the Cartoon Bank