(Continued from Part 1)
When we hate a person, rather than what that person has said or done, we are failing to challenge them to be accountable for their actions. It is called bigotry when you hate a person for who they are.
To reinforce that idea, we have this handy visual.
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| Used with permission |
What a strong word that is yet it seems that hate is driving so much of what is wrong in our world - a world teetering on the brink of disaster.
In the spirit of this blog, I would like to examine what it is that has gone wrong... to find the "other hand" of this terrible problem.
Surely it isn't wrong to dislike a lot of things that are going on around us these days. There is an awful lot to dislike - hate even. But as my mother told our son when he said "I hate raisins", my mom said You should say "I don't care for raisins". In the spirit of my mother's observation, I would like to suggest that we encourage everyone to be clear about what it is we "hate".
Nobody can look into another person's mind. We don't know their history - the things that drive them to be the person they are. When they act in a certain way it would seem to be obvious that they believe they are acting in a rational way, given what they know, and what their life has brought them to believe. As we used to say, "God doesn't make junk."
When one person does something we hate we might 'call them out' about it. We might even think we hate that person but, remembering my mom's suggestion, it isn't about the raisins. It is about the taste of those raisins. That is what we don't care for.
When a whole nation does something we hate, do we have to hate its population? By extension, do we have to act in hate to those who used to live in that nation or who pray in the same way as people whose nation did something we hate. In fact, what sense does it make to act in a hateful way to people we don't even know?
This isn't a theoretical discussion. So many lives have been lost, not just in war, but in acts of retribution. Yet the people who die are almost never the people whose actions a person should hate. People die because gunmen and bombers hate anyone who looks like or prays like those who acted in a way they hate.
What I don't know is how we can stop doing something I really do hate: pigeonholing people based on what we think we know about people like them.
Just so we all know, I am not naive. I know that hate makes money for a small number of people of great influence. Never-the-less, we are the ones who react to what those few are selling. We allow what those few do or say to manipulate our emotions. We don't have to let that happen.
I would love to know what can be done to spread the message: we, all of us, must stop this cycle of hate in order to save our world. There are much more important things that need to be done instead.
Yes, of course, I am preaching to the choir here, but we have to start somewhere. Hate the acts done if you must but, better still, let's end hate in ourselves and, if we can, encourage others to do the same.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
On the weekend, I happened upon a story about the actor Anthony Hopkins that seemed too good to be true. Before getting too interested, I fact-checked - far too many good-news stories are simply click-bait. In my search, that same story about Anthony Hopkins appeared in Paul Broks "long read" from The Guardian in April 2023. Broks' article has that and several other examples of coincidences that also seem too good to be true.
Be they premonitions, or serendipitous occurrences, coincidences happen to everyone. Some people pay more attention to them than others. When coincidences happen, how we react says a lot about our attitude to life.
My own attitude toward life and, in particular, coincidences borders on apophenia, "erroneous perception of patterns where none exist", While, I suppose, such a belief can be a problem for some I have lived, quite successfully, with this for a very long time. In fact, my post A Deeper Self from 2016 includes what I wrote in 1988 on this very subject.
Six and a half years ago (isn't time amazing - oh, definitely), the post Harder Than Rocket Science? appeared here. In an attempt to understand how the universe and everything works (42 might still be the answer), I made reference to Quantum Mechanics and, in particular, the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
This summer, a new idea has added an extra layer of understanding and might just be the path to a unified theory of everything. Published in April of this year, a paper titled Three-Dimensional Time: A Mathematical Framework for Fundamental Physics suggests that time might be the primary fabric of the universe, with mass and energy being manifestations of time's structure.
For a short summary of this somewhat radical idea, read this article from the Geophysical Institute where the author, Gunther Kletetschka, works.
Like other useful theories of everything, this theory has testable predictions, so stay tuned as it is either confirmed or refuted.
In the future, Kletetschka's name might be as well-known as Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, Rutherford, Schrödinger, and the many, many others who have contributed to our understanding of how the universe works, deep down.
I definitely prefer to think about issues of freedoms, politics, and finances as little as possible. However paranoid and scary this sounds, ignoring the issues and realities of the world is starting to become life-threatening.
It is likely a lot too late for me to try to pretend I'm someone other that the person I have revealed here and other places on the internet. If the black car rolls up in front of the house to take me away, I don't expect to have any defence. Even though I know better, to the outside world I am my opinions and beliefs.
A few years ago, I created a post here about being careful with your data. This morning another TED talk popped up. The situation has recently changed, and data is being gathered and used in more nefarious ways. Be careful everyone.
"It isn't your time. I didn't expect you to ever just visit me! Tell me, dear one, why are you here?"
It had been years since the last time I had been with Aadi, the spirit who had guided me so much along my way toward wholeness. I knew that she didn't live in any particular time. In point of fact, Aadi didn't live in time at all, but in all time, or better put, she lived in no time. But in at least one way, she seemed to be, like me, bound to an existence where bodies and their senses matter, in spite of the way she moved through time and space freely.
I said out loud, "Aadi, I don't know what you mean by 'It isn't your time'. I've been thinking about you and how you helped me in the past. Is there something we haven't talked about that I need to know right now?"
"You are surrounded and concerned about events that are like a drama that gets more and more tragic. My dear humans, all of you, all of us, are temporarily bound to this world of senses and events, with all of its drama,"
Aadi communicated this (she didn't talk, but I could hear her) and there was such great sadness in that thought. I had to know what else there could be besides worlds of senses and events, and knowing this thought she continued ...
"but you already know that beyond all senses, beyond emotion, desire, loneliness, there is another experience that transcends them all. Because you are human, you have given it a name, love, but you experience it as so much more than any word can convey. You are surrounded by it, always, beyond what you call time. I was expecting that our next encounter would mean you were filled up with that love, prepared to pass beyond the illusion that is this world."
I had always wondered about the nature of the timeless quality that Aadi had which I couldn't experience. Could it be that being bound up by my ego, and my desperate need to use my senses and label things, is what is holding me back from some further transformation that I need? Suddenly the story of Thomas, the Apostle of Jesus, came to mind. Aadi didn't need me to say it.
"Yes that story of Thomas has been used to bind us more tightly to this world, hasn't it?"
I must have seemed puzzled, so she continued.
"It is part of our long journey. Along that path we think various things about what is beyond life. We imagine salvation, a reward that we get, like money, for worshipping gods or doing deeds. Then we believe that salvation is what we get when we give up things like sex. Belief in things like sin or violence binds us tighter and tighter to the world, doesn't it? There have been so many stops along the way. Eventually we even doubt that there is anything more than this cycle of living and dying. The story of Doubting Thomas is about the need to find salvation first-hand, in the physical world. That need makes us turn away from an ineffable love that is beyond the physical. Our deepest beliefs either tie us to the world or release us from it."
'Hearing' Aadi say that puzzled me at first but in the context of what she had told me already, that what is true and eternal doesn't live in the physical but in love, I knew that in order to accept what is true and good in the spirit requires much more than actions or faith. It requires that we accept something far simpler than this complex, but temporary, reality that we live in. Thomas might have been wanting more than just evidence of death and resurrection. Perhaps he was hoping to find a way to understand what more there was beyond a broken and painful body. Perhaps the truth about Thomas' doubtful nature was more about experiencing some sort of eternal love. Sadly, religions and histories tend to be mostly about those who create them and write them down.
"You don't experience existence without time because we are here to learn and grow beyond time and everything else in this ego-centred world. Blessed are all who know love now because they have touched, seen, and, finally, accepted that there is so much more than sensation attached to what seem like actions. When it is your time, you will be prepared to abandon what you call ego. When all that is left is the thing you call love, it will be your time."
I felt overwhelmed and joyful at the same time.
"Oh, my dear, you are so close. Stay longer. There is more to learn."
In my mind, I thought how frustrating it must be trying to tell beings, who rely on senses and language, about a reality that cannot be felt or seen. Immediately I heard her voice in my head:
"Think of waking up after a bad dream. Remember the relief of knowing that none of that dream was really true or important - just a dream. It will be your time when you come to me, feeling that way about all of your adventures in the body, but rather than being relieved because it was bad, you accept that all of it was purposeful. It will be your time when you feel nothing but love for all of those versions of yourself, just as I do."
When I was a teenager, a relative whose opinion I respected declared that too many people only have ideas that are put in their head by others. Of course telling me this might simply have been his way of encouraging me to think for myself.
That relative was fond of good conversation. He would never have suggested that anyone who was part of the gathering should be forced to accept another's ideas. We were expected to listen respectfully before being given a chance to reply with our own thoughts on that subject. This implied that we were expected to have our own thoughts. We were also expected to be able to defend what we thought with facts.
The art of conversation has changed over the years. The chances for long conversations seem to have become rare. The closest thing for me is a long-distance chat 'online' with a good friend most evenings. But even then, we aren't expected to devote ourselves totally to the chat.
My relative could never have imagined the internet. He based his judgement on observing people simply regurgitating what they had heard on the news broadcast, or in a newspaper, rather than synthesizing those bits of information into something original. He felt a mindlessness was creeping into our world, in the same way that protesters chant at rallies.
I bring this up now because it seems more difficult to get information that isn't loaded with bias and judgement. When I pay attention to media, (anti)social or otherwise, it feels less like information and more like manipulation. It isn't even subtle anymore.
Let's have a discussion. Or at least, have a think, then come to your own conclusions.
Here are three videos at different levels on the topic of manipulation in the modern age.
If you are concerned about the effects of the social media echo chamber, this video might be one to pass along to a school-aged family member:
For someone a bit older, this youth TED talk:
and for the adults in the room, how social media drives extremism.
".... the printing press, newspapers, radio transmission, and TV broadcasts all expanded the number of people who could consume information. The internet is fundamentally different. It's a revolution that has, for the first time in history, created an explosion in who can create widely disseminated information. It's a fundamental shift: from few-to-many communication to many-to-many communication. Ideas, even false ones, spur action, and billions are now being exposed to new ideas at a rate greater than has ever before existed."*
"[It’s] not important to get children to read. Children who wanna read are gonna read. Kids who want to learn to read [are] going to learn to read. [It’s] much more important to teach children to QUESTION what they read.Children should be taught to question everything. To question everything they read, everything they hear. Children should be taught to question authority. Parents never teach their children to question authority because parents are authority figures themselves, and they don’t want to undermine their own bullshit inside the household. So they stroke the kid and the kid strokes them, and they all stroke each other ..."**
And now, as they say, for something completely different - a bit of fiction.
I'm not feeble (yet) but I am getting on, so generally I take my time when walking along a sidewalk. If I have to cross a street, I usually go out of my way to use a traffic light crossing, but not always.
On this particular day, I wanted to get across at a spot where the nearest traffic light was a bit too far, so I was standing on the sidewalk, clearly waiting to cross when there was a break in the traffic. A small crowd of folks were coming along and when they reached me, a pre-teen in the group asked if she could help me get across the road. Figuring she needed to get her badge or some such thing, I said "sure, that would be lovely". She took my elbow and we started across. I did notice another other person who was also crossing at the same time, but didn't think anything of it until afterward.
The young lady was chatting to me about the day and the weather. Finally we got to the other side and as I was about to say goodbye and carry on in my errand, the adult who had crossed with us, yelled "Cut!"
No, none of that happened. Yet something similar might have happened to some other older woman, given the recent flood of Good Samaritan videos that are appearing on social media.
In the latest online example, a chap carrying a backpack and pushing a baby in a stroller is shown trying to get everything up to the top of the stairs in a subway exit. As he is almost t0 the top carrying the backpack and the baby, another chap rushes up the stairs grabs the backpack out of the man's arms and keeps going. "Oh no!" you might think, that guy just stole the backpack, but no, he drops the pack at the top then rushes down to the bottom where he picks up the stroller and carries it up to the street level to re-unite the stroller, parent, baby, and backpack in an "oh-isn't-that-wonderful" moment.
Have we in media-land just witnessed a random act of kindness? Well, yes and no. Clearly the video was not from a security camera. Someone was holding that camera. Well, actually, two someones were holding the cameras. Either that or everyone went back downstairs and they shot the whole thing again from the top of the stairs so that it could all be spliced together into a well-composed vid. What we have really witnessed was a staged good deed.
In my generous moments, I figure these videos might simply be an attempt to convince us that helping others in need is a good thing. I am not sure, but even though I have a suspicious nature there doesn't seem to be any subversion going on here. It might be, as K suggests, that these things actually happened and these videos are just dramatizing the event to put something good on the internet. There is always lots of bad news.
In those suspicious moments, I ask "where is the money coming from to produce these very professional looking vignettes?"
For now, I shall file it all under the heading "things that make me say hmm... "
In that post, calling my curiosity an endearing quality (s)he confirmed an idea that I had somehow discovered by intuition - the idea that the world that our consciousness resides in is but one of a seemingly infinite collection. She told me that I should "Stop by and visit again" if I got stuck. I did visit her again, but never with knowledge that physicists are now widely accepting a theory of reality known as the "Many-Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics"*.
The idea proposed, in a paper entitled "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function" by doctoral candidate Hugh Everett in 1957 was an elegant solution to many problems that had bothered the minds of physicists, such as Albert Einstein, among others. Yet, at the time of its publishing, most rejected Everett's thesis.
I recall seeing somewhere the idea that if you had enough monkeys playing with typewriters (yes, it was that long ago) one of them would eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Clearly this sort of mind game requires a very large number of monkeys yet this seems to be the answer to a great number of puzzles in the world.
For example, we could ask how it could be that an animal could be created that had the ability to fly silently at night, to detect food on the ground below, and to catch it. For a very long time, we reasoned that a god was responsible. There might indeed be a god or goddess at work as well, but a great number of us now believe that a fellow named Charles Darwin got it right with his natural selection theory. Given enough time, creatures 'evolve', because genetic mutations that give them some small or large advantage (like flight or night vision) will tend to breed and pass these advantages along. Given enough time, and small mutations, you end up with an owl.
Another example is 'the miracle' that is planet Earth. How could we be so lucky as to be placed upon a planet that has all of the advantages of Earth? The simple answer is that if we hadn't been evolving on this planet, but instead on Mars say, we would never have survived. We only exist because we are here. No supernatural force is needed in this explanation. We know very well now that there are billions of other planets circling billions of stars in billions of galaxies (thank you, Carl Sagan). We might be the only 'lucky' ones. But is it really lucky or supernatural that we are here and being here means having life?
I recall a particularly religious family member saying to us "everything happens for a reason". Over the decades since, many of the seemingly religion-associated ideas have managed to turn themselves into ideas that make sense in very different ways from what those family members could have thought. For example, the admonition "Thou Shalt Not Kill" was converted in my mind to "Thou Cannot Kill", a promise that while we have a body that decays (even while we are in it) we are not our body. An essential part of us won't die when that body is no longer able to support us.
In the case of everything happens for a reason, the fact (strange as it seems) is that everything does happen but we are only conscious of one particular version of the universe. We are blissfully unaware of the others where we are either very different from who we think we are or where we don't exist at all.
*If you are an avid reader here, you might remember another post on the "Many Worlds Theory". Get entangled here.
This monologue opens one of my favourite movies. I expect a few others feel the same way.
As a child, everything that happened or was expected of me required an answer to that simple question. I was definitely an annoying child but luckily I grew up with loving folks who tolerated my curious (and persistent) nature. Yet, for a very long time, being grown up meant losing my 'why' obsession. I think this had to do with the feeling that life was without purpose. Life seemed for a long time to be something to be endured.
Fortunately, in my mid-thirties, I regained a small share of that childhood curiosity. The documents, transcribed in 2016 beginning here, written in the late 1980s mostly, came about because of an obsession with knowing if life, my life in particular, had a purpose. I cannot imagine my life now without referring to the answer that came to me then and lives inside me.
In the video below Rabbi Simon Jacobson delves into the question of what gives life purpose and gives an answer that I can relate to very strongly. I particularly appreciate that while he approaches his attempt to answer that question from a Biblical scholar and Kabbalist's perspective, he shows great respect for the intelligence and background of his listener. As he quotes in his talk “the God you don't believe in, I don't believe in, too".
Everything hangs on the little word
here
and its sibling
now
But I often forget this,
keeping busy with my plans;
building for a future I cannot know
and against worries I cannot finally tame.
And yet, You wait for me to come home to Your now
which is beyond past and future,
and return to Your here
which is present before beginning
and beyond every ending.
If I could love as God loves
I would not fear the judgment of others,
or the loss of my very self,
and would know that God is the one who knows and loves
and desires himself and all things,
and loves me most when I finally let go of trying and simply let myself
live love.
Ours is not the work of seeking You here or there where we think You might be,
but of opening the heart’s door.
And when we do this You cannot resist coming in,
since our opening and Your entering
are one.
You knock and wait.
And when we open, we find
that You were there all along,
and will not leave us.
~~
Meister Eckhart
(Continued from part 1)
When Evelyn Underhill published the quote below, in 1911, she lived in a world of relatively few distractions. Even so, she understood that in all ages, the search for the Divine requires that we first of all put aside what our five senses gather.
Today that "mist of thought", the ever more complex assault on our minds, is an even greater barrier to knowing that stillness at the core of our being. It sometimes feels like a conspiracy to keep us from being fully human.
What is it that smears the windows of the senses? Thought, convention, self-interest. We throw a mist of thought between ourselves and the external world: and through this we discern, as in a glass darkly, that which we have arranged to see. We see it in the way in which our neighbours see it; sometimes through a pink veil, sometimes through a grey. Religion, indigestion, priggishness, or discontent may drape the panes. The prismatic colours of a fashionable school of art may stain them. Inevitably, too, we see the narrow world our windows show us, not "in itself," but in relation to our own needs, moods, and preferences; which exercise a selective control upon those few aspects of the whole which penetrate to the field of consciousness and dictate the order in which we arrange them, for the universe of the natural man is strictly egocentric. We continue to name the living creatures with all the placid assurance of Adam: and whatsoever we call them, that is the name thereof. Unless we happen to be artists — and then but rarely — we never know the "thing seen in its purity; never, from birth to death, look at it with disinterested eyes. Our vision and understanding of it are governed by all that we bring with us, and mix with it, to form an amalgam with which the mind can deal. To "purify" the senses is to release them, so far as human beings may, from the tyranny of egocentric judgments; to make of them the organs of direct perception. This means that we must crush our deep-seated passion for classification and correspondences; ignore the instinctive, selfish question, "What does it mean to me?" learn to dip ourselves in the universe at our gates, and know it, not from without by comprehension, but from within by self-mergence.
from Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People Chapter III, paragraph 8.
More than a few times I have said a silent thank you to my step-father. He was a very opinionated person more likely to snarl at you because he knew you were smart than if he thought you were stupid. If he knew you were smart, and you did something he thought of as stupid, clearly you weren't paying attention to the task at hand, at least, not at the level he believed you could and should.
Driving was a case in point. When I had my learner's permit, he suggested I take him for a drive so he could see how I was doing. Driving along, suddenly, he reached up and turned the rear-view mirror so that I couldn't see behind me and simultaneously asked me to describe the car that was following us - how close it was and so forth. Luckily, I had just checked, figuring he might do such a thing. I passed his test, but his comment was that I didn't check my mirrors often enough and I must always know what was going on all around my car while I was in charge of it. "One never knows when an emergency will come up - the car in front might suddenly stop and you will need to know that you have room to swerve. You won't have time to check in that moment, so you have to always know that you are clear to manoeuvre."
What brought this back to my mind, you ask? I have been reading a book by Hannah Fry called "Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms". In her chapter "Cars", she describes a not-so-distant future where cars can drive themselves - mostly. In this future, the driver will give over control to the car for long periods of time. The car will mostly be capable of decision-making. However, if the situation becomes overwhelming, or too complex, the car will sound a signal for the human driver to take over. I can imagine the horrified look on the face of the driver as they realize that the situation is out of hand - a scary way to end one's life.
My step-father would be appalled at the very idea of this situation. He didn't even like automatic transmissions, power steering, or power brakes because they would make one less attentive to driving. And because he would have been appalled by a self-driving car, and he taught me about attentiveness and preparedness, the idea appalls me too.
You can be sure the self-driving feature won't be something I will use when it becomes standard equipment on all automobiles. I don't want the ghost of my step-father to haunt me!
Sometimes a message you need comes from a chance encounter. So it is with this video.
Here is Bernadette Peters singing No One is Alone from Into the Woods. Its composer, Stephen Sondheim, died two months ago, but he can never be truly gone when such music and words remain.
If you think climate change is a difficult problem to solve, you might be surprised to discover there is another much more difficult - no let's be honest - impossible problem to solve and we are contributing to it right now.
We all know that while we use our phone, pad, or computer, every click and search is used to target us in, for example, advertising. We might even know that our 'likes' and 'comments' are all used to make sure we see more of the same thing online. A word like "algorithm" sounds very mathematical and computerlike, yet the term "business model" is much more to the point, for nothing in this capitalistic world is free. What we do online is our payment for the provider's service, and this is like gold to a political party or a potential dictator. It would be unfair to give away much more. There is a video below and it is informative and well-presented.
Maybe you know a teenager who needs to watch this. While I definitely learned some things, at my age, my searches and clicks don't matter to most companies, or politicians, or ... anyone. Cynic that I am, I honestly have no hope that we, as a society, can escape the traps that have already been sprung or will be sprung very soon.
However, it is better to know the problem. That way you will know where to allocate the blame when ... No, I'm not going to spoil it.
