. . . how you add a new post. To this blog. I’ve only been adding new posts to this blog for about three years now.
This is how things are, right this moment.
My knickers are in a twist again. Again it’s about folks who think causally. I’ve written about this before.
Causally. I do mean causally. Not casually, although that bothers me too – “casual” thought is an oxymoron. No, I mean causally. As in causation. As in, “if this, then that.” As in, “because.”
I know, I know. We need logic or we’d go even crazier than we already are. Heck, I earn my living from logic.
I just don’t want to get carried away with it.
This latest cramp I’m in comes from Eben Alexander’s book PROOF OF HEAVEN: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into The Afterlife. In case you can’t tell from the title, the doctor-author had what’s called a “near-death experience,” in his case from a meningitis-induced coma. He had visions of angels in heaven.
Again, contemplate the title — proof, he says.
Really?
I’m too irritated to get into the ins-and-outs of why this is making me so cross. For a cogent criticism, go here. Or try this one, from Scientific American. I like the comment “the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation.”
I also like the quote in the Scientific American article from neuroscientist Oliver Sacks: “[T]he one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander’s case, then, is that his [near-death experience] occurred . . . as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation, but instead insists on a supernatural one.”
I also like Nassim Taleb’s BLACK SWAN theory. Taleb catalogs the grievous mistakes into which the drive to make up stories about stuff can gull us. There are powerful built-in incentives to come up with organized narratives. These stories may create a sense of order in us, they may orient and locate, they may help make us feel better about being flyspecks in the eye of the divine – but they do not necessarily *explain* reality.
I mean to say, I’m prepared to enjoy the picture Alexander paints of his near-death experience. I just do not want to buy his explanation for it.
Also, Dr. Alexander makes much on his website of this quote of his: “Consciousness is the most profound mystery in the universe.”
Dadgummit, more to be mad about. Jeez. Our consciousness may be “the most profound mystery in the universe” to us, maybe, if we are blinded by our own humano-centrism. I doubt the nearest asteroid barreling down on us would see it from our point of view.
In any case, I doubt even the good doctor really believes what he says, in genuflecting before profound mystery. If he thinks he’s “proved” something, he’s still thinking causally. And causal thinking leads to answers. Not mystery.
In case you’re still with me, for which thank you, here’s a quote from Taleb that does it for me: “Marcus Tullius Cicero presented the following story. One Diagoras, a nonbeliever in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, and then survived a subsequent shipwreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked ‘Where were the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned?’”
You want a profound mystery in the universe? How about this one here, from Dr. Michael Mosely, concerning our digestive system. In each and every one of us human beings, there is this tube that runs right the way through, from mouth to the other business end. This system contains a “little brain,” a network of neurons. “[T]here are over 100 million of these cells in your gut, as many as there are in the head of a cat.”
Really??
Imagine that! (If you can also imagine somebody counting neurons, one, two, 550,000, 986,523, one million, two, nine hundred ninety-nine million bottles of beer on the wall.)
But seriously. Let’s say it’s true. These cats – these sentient beings whom we love so well and admire – these beings who, we know perfectly well, have their feelings, their way of doing things, their personalities each one different from the other – not to mention the beauty and grace and elegance of these gorgeous beings –
We got all that going on in our guts?
I wonder what it would be like to feel toward my digestive system like I feel toward my cats. To be as amazed and full of awe and wonder as that.
I want a little respect paid to mysteries. I want to hear the humility to confess that we can’t possibly explain what’s going on, with things on this level. With 100 million neurons and life and death and after death and all like that. To think we know what’s going on, with questions of that magnitude, is to commit petty violence on the magnificence.
Though I should be studying the law of contracts, what I’m going to do now is to stop thinking about all this vexatiousness and go pet my cats.
My little stomachs.
Yesterday I attended a memorial for a judge. This man had a great capacity to inspire love in others, even despite his important position in a world that does not seem to embody this trait. I know this man had that capacity, partly because I had the great honor and pleasure to spend one Thanksgiving – just one – as a guest where this man and his wife were also invited. I myself felt that love for him, after just that one encounter over turkey.
I found this uncanny. The encounter was so brief, compared to my lasting sense of him.
The same friend — husband to one of my closest intimates — who extended the Thanksgiving invitation also spoke the judge’s eulogy. From what this man said, I surmised that the judge had the capacity to inspire love in this friend because the judge, himself, was so free with his own capacity to love others.
This could not have been more plain, in the love my friend expressed in return. It was painful to hear the depth of loss. Even though I know that my friends will keep that love alive and warm within them for as long as they live – and, therefore, for as long as we share our lives on this planet.
Brotherly Love.
I was also struck, to my very core, by the choice at the memorial of Leonard Cohen’s HALLELUJAH. Now friends, this is the Bible Belt. The judge was a son of this region, being born in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
How many judges – from anywhere – do you think would have had that song as a choice at their memorial? Here are a few lyrics to help you decide, from HALLELUJAH by Leonard Cohen. A Jewish man, by the way, a man of my own generation.
So was the judge of my generation, being, as he was, only six years older than I.
You say you took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken hallelujah
The broken hallelujah.
How many judges do you think – from anywhere – would have chosen to go out with that? With the holy, and the broken?
I might add, by the way, that this judge had been chief of staff for Bill Clinton during Clinton’s first term as governor of Arkansas. I might also add that Mr. Clinton himself also spoke yesterday. And I did see the power and might behind his former federal office. The military guards. The big black Cadillac SUVs ranked outside the door.
Even though Mr. Clinton sat at the end of a row, in the audience just like the rest of us.
Like the rest of the thousands of us, I should say.
So here was it for me. I understood this judge to be a man who could make his way in this broken world, as a champion of education, of justice, a man who inspired love in others because he himself knew what it was to be broken, and he could still to be so free with love for others.
He and his wife would also show up on their motorcycles, in full leather kit. Big motorcycles. I’m told his wife was the one who had that idea first!
So what is it, then, to love in a broken world?
I look to my cats. As the boys in my life.
They are themselves. They are just as they are. They are semi-wild creatures, big personalities confined in territory too small, sharing it with a madwoman. Under those circumstances, they are entitled to be wild.
And they still fight like wild things, too. On the same day I took these pictures, Bugsy ended up with a patch gone out of his fur and a scratch above his right eye.
Perhaps men do not come by domestication easily.
But my cats also accommodate themselves, with immense grace, to the realities in which they find themselves.
That was the other song at the memorial.
Amazing Grace.
Today – the first time I’ve ever seen it – it was Bugsy going two rounds on Barney.
It was after dinner, in the cool gray evening of a quiet Sunday. Barnes was meditating, inhaling the first lawn-mowing of the season. Bugs was crouched a few yards away from him, on the floor by the play-mat.
Knowing perfectly well Bugs wouldn’t like it, I flopped down on the floor right next to him, close as a whisker-width. Sometimes I just get tired of the cats having their way all the time.
Sure enough, he got up and stalked off.
But suddenly he hit the floor and commenced to doing that stalking-hip-sashay thing. You cat people know what I’m talking about. He then launched himself over the box and landed right on top of Barney.
Thereupon it was a throw-down of the all-too-often-repeated same-old. But where Bugs is usually the attackee, this time the tables turned.
Left hook to the ear! Arm-lock around the throat! Ferocious bitey to the back of the neck! Barney is down! makes like a fish! Flops free! Dashes off! Is tackled! Repeat!
And then – quiet.
No trash-talk, no blood, nor flying fur.
Night falls. Another day is done.
Bugs is much more himself, these days, than he has been in the seven months since Fang died and Barney arrived. Here he is doing the bunny death-kick to an offending feather.
Here’s the death-dash up the screen, going for mousie.
Here’s Barney contemplating same.
Doing same.
Here’s Barney’s version of coming into his own – the two-tone ruff.
These elegant, fascinating beings who make their home with us.
I had an incredibly sustaining and supportive dream the other night. I was being chased by Nazis. (Yes, I did say sustaining and supportive.) My cats Bugs and Barney came to my rescue.
This was my unconscious shaking its booty, busily working away on a mixed-up mess of input. Trust me, it really does all make sense – and I think it has a lot to say about what’s wrong with the world and what we can do about it. Or, more probably, what we can “not-do” about it.
The elements in my dream derive from my:
* Background trauma of the Holocaust
* Historical training in t’ai chi
* Current practice in the FELDENKRAIS METHOD®
* Current experience of empathy through Nonviolent Communication
* Current practice in biofeedback through Les Fehmi’s Open Focus
* Watching INSIDE JOB, a supremely lucid explication of the financial crash. (Yes, I did say sustaining and supportive. Welcome to my world.)
As I said. Chased by Nazis. I turned my back on my pursuers and began to execute the t’ai chi posture of Squatting Single Whip. This is one among many, if not all, t’ai chi postures that completely elude me. After all, my joints are not Chinese. Here’s Squatting Single Whip, done by Professor Cheng Man-ch’ing. The picture comes from T’ai Chi Ch’uan, the cover of which claims it’s a “simplified method of calisthenics for health & self defense.” I don’t know about the “simplified” part. Anyway. My point.
Squatting Single Whip
I suddenly had the feeling that a very calm and peaceful man was glued right up behind me, doing the same movement, totally supporting my back. He and I were moving as one.
A heavenly feeling of love and power washed over me.
I awoke to find Bugs and Barney pressed against my back as we all slept together. A picture of this cat-cluster will have to wait for a dawn that earlier breaks than it does now. Let these pictures stand in until then.
Bugs awake.
Bugs asleep.
Barney.
So – here we have a visitation from old, old anxieties – and fight-flight defenses against them. How to persuade those defenses to relax their grip? So I can find another way toward freedom, toward finding my own way? It’s a real dilemma. These defenses are so stubborn and entrenched, sometimes it seems that they really need to get whopped upside the head for them to yield.
On the other hand, they are there for good reason. This, it seems to me, is reason enough to respect them. I prefer an approach that persuades them away gently, with a more coherent and considered and empathetic approach. By the “soft power” of understanding. By which understanding, the old ways can be retired.
At least it’s been that way for me.
By “soft power,” I don’t mean narcissistic buzz that zaps the synapses. I mean the feeling of lightness and warmth and peace that comes from empathy and understanding. The “givingness” of that feeling. The gratitude. The expansive generosity of it.
So maybe this is the meaning of my dream.
It’s not just Nazis. When I try to understand the 2008 financial crash, I get a similar feeling of baffled, disbelieving terror. How was it possible that so many people could behave in a manner that seemed nothing short of insane? When, after the crash, the insanity was so blindingly obvious?
It’s less difficult to imagine being led astray by blandishments, given how powerful the longing must be to raise one’s kids in a nice house no matter how financially unlikely. But what must it have taken to achieve the cynicism necessary to have been a banker, a trader, a ratings agent? That imaginative a feat I simply could not pull off.
But the movie I watched the night I had my dream – INSIDE JOB – made clear that the end destination was by no means necessarily obvious in the beginning, in the ‘80′s. With success, and more power and power and power, the ruling narrative became so invincible, only a very few could see the truth of it at all. A few guys – and gals, I’m glad to say – did see it, and tried to warn of it. But the iron fist of power and denial was wielded against them, with all the intractable force of our anxiety-defenses, and these prophets were marginalized. Or worse.
And for the major players, it seemed to be a matter of hard, narrow focus, on only one’s own bottom line. What do I care if this debt will default? I can sell it quick, before that, and keep the fees. I can even bet the debt will fail, and I can profit even more. I and mine will be more, and we will be well. And that is all that matters.
So. I have a pretty good hunch that the feeling of understanding I got from the movie contributed to my good dream. It seems that the ability to understand, for me, is my avenue into “soft power.” Not fight or flight fueled by rampant anxiety. Just a witnessing, with deep and sober regret, that things have come to this.
With that understanding, my boys and I can sleep at night. And that’s no small thing.
So on this cold rainy morning, I find peace of mind to contemplate the plum blossoms just outside my window — and I feel glad. Even though the world is in such a state.
Maybe especially because it is so.
My dear friends in Michigan, kimmo, spiveroo, stewie, smeezer, and boo, are all excited about Vermont Country Store’s latest offering.
Just add water.
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This morning Bugs finally deigned to enlighten us — dear Readers, we who are his acolytes — as to what is the thing with cats and boxes.
Recall this question was stimulated by the pods in which my birthday presents arrived the other day. Our friend Austin over at CATachresis brought this matter to a head.
Bugs explains, Barney demonstrates.
I get in the box. Fullness.
I get out of the box. Emptiness.
This conundrum is expostulated-on by the allegorical figure “Dialectic.”
Philosophers are born, not made.
Our friend minlit, over at Confessions Of A Cat Woman, knows this well.
