Religion in horror and America

Came upon this essay accidentally this morning. The irony is that this (growing up in religious schools) was a topic in three conversations last week* (different people who lived it; one called it the "school of hypocrisy"). While I can't really contribute to the conversation because I didn't have that experience, I've known others who did live it. Including my father.

As author C. J. Leede comments, the roots run deep, perhaps a thousand years ago. Although, my limited experience in Europe suggests that perhaps it's influence may no longer be as strong in many places there. A French colleague once mentioned that hundreds of years of religious wars there makes people weary and wary of religious repression and control (have heard similarly of Asia). Obviously, some countries are still willing to kill and maim in the name of their gods, such as several places in the Middle East. Some treat women like property and dogs. I find this tantamount to extreme hypocrisy and excuse for patriarchal control. 

Regardless, the bad vapors of religion manifest in various ways, often permeating and fusing with capitalism, and, as the US is a perfect example of current times, politics. Some mistake religious piety for greed. As I mentioned in our conversation the other day, the demon in the box pulling the strings is power. Greed and power seem to be twins, so delineating where one begins and the other ends is difficult. They are joined at the hips. Or, perhaps, the brain. 

"When I ask myself why I wrote 'American Rapture,' why I read religious horror or watch it on the screen, when I really stop and think, what do I wish more than anything I had known when I was a young girl trying to step into herself?

It’s this: Repression—religious or otherwise—is the horror. Ignorance is what we should fear. What makes us all ill-equipped for moving through life as humans in natural human bodies.

And maybe little girls aren’t born into more sin than little boys. Maybe sin is just an idea we’ve created for control. A powerful little beast that preys on all of us every day, in and outside of fiction. And maybe it’s one we just don’t need to feed anymore". - C. J. Leede  

* The people whom I had these conversations with were unconnected, nor did I initiate the aforementioned topic. This suggests people may actually be thinking about such subjects. I interpret that as a good sign, aka maybe hope?

The never-ending questions

The running theme in this blog, perhaps in my entire life, has been on reality, or what we think may be reality. What is reality?  Is that a valid question?

As author, literary agent, and 'thinker' John Brockman once proclaimed, he has had a lifelong obsession with asking questions, especially "the" question: "What is the last question?". 

Brockman's first book on pondering questions was By The Late John Brockman, published in 1969. In his own words, it was "about the idea of interrogating reality". Most would respond by declaring this is useless philosophy, thereby concluding it all meaningless. Yet each and every one of us plays apart in it, and without it. (As suggested in the movie, "The Matrix") Most of us just aren't aware of it. 

"Reality as a whole is unmeasurable except through effect. The unity is in the methodology, in the writing, reading, in the navigation. This system cannot provide us with ultimate answers, nor does it present the ultimate questions. There are none."*

This also precipitated his vision of the 'Third culture' consisting of "those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are." 

In 1988 Brockman and others created The Edge Foundation, an association of science and technology intellectuals. It was also an outgrowth of The Reality Club, a gathering (historically called a 'salon') of intellectuals based in NYC and held by a host. From 1981 through 1996 many well known scientists, authors, artists, technologists, and entrepreneurs met for presentations, 'round-table' discussions, seminars, etc. It retired to a virtual  presence on The Edge website in 1996. (A link on the sidebar has been posted when I created this blog in 2005.)

Despite frequently following the website after I first discovered The Edge (~1998), life became complicated and I lost track of it. An academic career sometimes consume the only existence in one's life, especially in LAC (Life After Children). I was busy "interrogating" small subsets of reality. 

It was with sadness (on my part) that Brockman ran out of questions and announced in 2018 the finale to The Edge project with the question, "WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION?". 

"Ask 'The Last Question,' your last question, the question for which you will be remembered."

Possibly the best tribute to The Edge was in a ''moratorium'' by lecturer and writer Kenan Malik in The Guardian. The excerpt below gave me some private satisfaction in that I have always relayed similarly to students, children, colleagues, lab members, friends, relatives, and, many times, here on this blog: ask questions. (despite the frustrations of many).

"Asking questions is relatively easy. Asking good questions is surprisingly difficult. A bad question searches for an answer that confirms what we already know. A good question helps to reset our intellectual horizons. It has an answer that we can reach, yet unsettles what we already know."

 One response on the webpage, which may not really qualify as an answer for some, is one of my favorites. As we often say in the scientific fields, answers to a question may only be more questions.

"The final elegance: assuming, asking the question. No answers. No explanations. Why do you demand explanations? If they are given, you will once more be facing a terminus. They cannot get you any further than you are at present. The solution: not an explanation: a description and knowing how to consider it."**

Many people are unsettled by that, but it is the reality. Perhaps it is a very simple single question with no explanation. Just like reality.

________________________________________________________

 * John Brockman, By The Late John Brockman, 1969, Macmillon. The Kindle format can be accessed on Amazon.com. Hard copies are >$70.

** Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E.

Theories and uncertainty

I love this quote. Wish I had it on a rubber stamp. 

"Being unable to accurately measure the thing on which a theory is based is a fairly fundamental uncertainty." - John Kennedy, climate scientist and physicist

 Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in measurement, anybody? 

Secrets in a Strange Land

 "The secret always finds its way out, if not in words, then somatically, and most often in a way that it can be dealt with and helped in a straightforward manner. [Usually] So what does the woman do when she finds the secret leaking out? She runs after it with great expenditure of energy. She beats, bundles, and burrows it back down into the dead zone again, and builds larger defenses. She calls inner guardians and ego defenders to build more doors, more walls. The woman leans against her latest psychic tomb, sweating blood and beathing like a locomotive. 

A woman who carries a secret is an exhausted woman. Secrets cause a person to become haunted."

- excerpt from Women Who Run with Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Quantum evolution

To fully understand evolution, and life itself, one must be able to grasp quantum theory (quantum mechanics is mostly mathematical equations at the microscopic level and not at all required to conceptually understand quantum systems). General relativity is also a quantum system. 

Seeing time only through clocks and calendars will never give us any kind of appreciation of time on a larger scale. Those are metrics, but are not really time itself. Same with evolution: it exists at many points and flows back and forth. It really can't fit into what we consider as 'time'.  

Biophysicist Werner Loewenstein succinctly presents evolution as a quantum system of information.*  Rather than thinking of evolution following a linear path in time, it is information in the quantum realm, constantly shifting places like tiny sand particles on an ocean beach. 

Thus, evolution is chunks of information existing in the future and the past. What we see is how it manifests only at any point within that realm. There is no moment of 'creation' just as there is no moment of 'end'. Species don't magically appear; they evolve, and devolve. 

"It is difficult to even talk about an instant of time, because we can’t even say with certainty which “chunks” of space-time lie in the future and which in the past." -physicist Jonathan Oppenheim 

Evolution requires us to jump off that restrictive scale and think in terms of shifting sands.

* The Touchstone of Life. Werner Loewenstein, 1998.

Whose afraid of Virginia Woolf?

While reading this post about Virginia Woolf,  I was reminded of an internal and eternal dialogue pondering the question of how we perceive 'alone' and 'lonely'. The problem is that the two are not synonymous, although the wide perception often is. 'Alone' is not always 'lonely'. Yet, we are conditioned to think that anyone that is alone is 'lonely'. 

Semantically, 'alone' can mean 'solitude'. A person can be literally alone: by one's self away from other people. It may feel comfortable or uncomfortable. I can be alone, the only human on a mountain top, and not lonely; I feel solitude and connected to all life round me. Likewise, a person can be 'alone' and unconnected in a crowd of people, but comfortable with it. It's usually a choice. It's less about our circumstance, but how we react to them.*

But 'loneliness' is less ambiguous: it's a feeling of being alone, unconnected, and not liking it. Both are internal states, but loneliness is less related to what is going on around us. It's a fear of solitude. 

Individually there is a wide area-under-the-curve for each on what is comfortable and what is not. Yet, the cultural definition and expectations for everyone, including children, are quite narrow and contradictory. We are expected to know ourselves, but to always be 'social', e.g. with other people. Unfortunately, too many people don't know themselves, or are uncomfortable being alone with themselves. They fear it.

So it's an illusion, created by ourselves and society. 

In the medical community and the public mindset people are expected to always be surrounded by other people. Those that prefer to be alone are almost always considered 'unwell' or 'abnormal' because, culturally, 'alone' = 'lonely'. Then comes the judgement deluge.

Those two terms don't take into consideration the time element: always, occasionally, mostly, etc. Those adverbs are important because they quantify the the amount of alone time. Or even when feeling lonely. 

Some people feel they have to be with another person, or amongst other people, all the time. I've known a few people (mostly women, but a few men, too) who almost have panic attacks when they are alone. Their loneliness is overwhelming, usually because they don't know themselves, or they fear being alone with themselves. Perhaps they even fear not knowing themselves; they lack self-esteem.

There's also a gender bias: women are expected to always be surrounded by people, and in a personal relationship with another (usually a man, but that's another topic...). Men.... not so much, if at all. In a few countries, cultural acceptance of a woman alone in public, especially without a male, is prohibitive. It's like requiring your dog on a leash when in public. 

Alternatively, because I'm a woman that prefers solitude most of the time and lives alone the all too-common perception is that I'm lonely. I've had to fend off questions and comments from others implying judgement, such as pity or concern of unwellness. Especially, 'You don't have a man so you must be lonely and helpless'. Or, 'There's something wrong with you.' That's the expectation associated with perceptions of 'alone' and 'loneliness' of many women.

'Alone' and 'lonely' are illusions we create about ourselves and others (Virginia Woolf refers to it as 'a reality', which is partly correct). And with those illusions, we place judgement and expectations on ourselves and others. We celebrate self-esteem. But we stigmatize spending time with the person we should know, and like, the best: ourselves.

Woolf's writings exemplified the strong pervasive feelings of loneliness and the illusions of it. In a diary entry she wrote of this as being a 'reality': 

"That is one of the experiences I have had...and got then to a consciousness of what I call “reality”: a thing I see before me: something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist. Reality I call it."

Woolf's angst (she was bipolar) with what was 'real' for her, and the societal illusions and expectations about being alone and lonely (especially as a woman), ultimately influenced her choice to end her life. Ironically, over a century later, that societal perception still exists. 

In her post, author Maria Popova writes,

"There is a kind of loneliness that lodges itself in the psyche and never fully leaves, a loneliness most anguishing not in solitude but in companionship and amid the crowd. If solitude fertilizes the imagination, loneliness vacuums it of vitality and sands the baseboards of the spirit with the scratchy restlessness of longing — for connection, for communion, for escape. And yet it is out of this restlessness that so many great works of art are born."

On the other hand, solitude lacks an illusion, or sense of loneliness, and it also feeds imagination and creativity. Journalist and Buddhist Zat Rana writes, 

"When you surround yourself with moments of solitude and stillness, you become intimately familiar with your environment in a way that forced stimulation doesn’t allow.

The world becomes richer, the layers start to peel back, and you see things for what they really are, in all their wholeness, in all their contradictions, and in all their unfamiliarity. You learn that there are other things you are capable of paying attention to than just what makes the most noise on the surface."

Being alone does not always have to mean 'loneliness'. Not all of us are afraid of Virginia Woolf, of living life free of illusion.

* Some people like feeling lonely, but that is more of a pathological issue and I'm not delving into that except for my reference to Virginia Woolf. 

We construct or deconstruct our future

“Many crucial issues need to be handled globally, and involve long-term planning. In contrast, the governmental focus is on the short-term and the national or local. Moreover, the actions of large corporations are less and less easy to regulate by any government.

In tackling climate change, for instance, we are asked to make short-term sacrifices for the benefit of people in remote parts of the world 50 years (or more) into the future — to pay an insurance premium now, as it were, to reduce the probability of a worst-case climatic disaster during the lifetime of a child born today. Politicians are influenced by the press and by their inboxes. So these actions will slip down the agenda unless there’s public pressure. Governments will only prioritize these actions if pressured by a popular crusade. But that’s how all big social changes happen: abolition of slavery, black power, gay rights, etc.”. - excerpt from interview with Martin Rees, astrophysicist

What separates children from adults, and humans from non-human primates, is the ability to think about time over long-term. That includes predictions, actions, consequences, and planning. Unfortunately, the tendency is to think short-term and even disregard long-term. I call it the “Me Now” mentality. Most profit-driven interests are short-term, and governmental actions have been following suit.

However, most successful businesses are those that plan for the long-term, while also considering short-term. Most financial planners, historians, and ecologists are trained to think in terms of many timelines: past, present and future. But our culture and society tend to nurture short-term goals and ignore or deny long-term predictions and consequences. We are experiencing the effects of that now; especially in the current economic and political arenas.

It’s time to change that. We are not children, and we are not monkey or apes.

Or, are we?

Sobering thoughts for a Sunday morning

"We have become the United States of Spite, and we are in this condition because it serves the interests of the plutocrats to have us at each others throats as our quality of life disappears upstream.

This new administration has set about undoing every good thing government has done for us, one vile rescission after another. And they do it with a righteous glee that sickens me. They do it with a logic that is not logic, using facts that are not facts. And they're cheered on by people who are likely to be among their worst victims.
 

It's hellish."

A-Z Challenge. Wonder and Wisdom

"Wisdom begins with wonder." - Socrates

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." - Socrates

"Socrates liked to tease his interlocutors by saying that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing. There is a deep insight in this, for the one thing that is more dangerous than true ignorance is the illusion of knowledge and understanding. Such illusion abounds, and one of the first tasks of philosophy – as wonderfully demonstrated by Socrates in Plato's "Meno" – is to explore our claims to know things about ourselves and the world, and to expose them if they are false or muddled. It does so by beginning with the questions we ask, to ensure that we understand what we are asking; and even when answers remain elusive, we at least grasp what it is that we do not know. This in itself is a huge gain. One of the most valuable things philosophy has given me is an appreciation of this fact." - Anonymous quote

To wonder is to keep alive and fresh the child's curiosity. For, indeed, there lies the beginnings of wonder and wisdom. And the beauty of life.

A-Z Challenge. K is for Karma

Karma is the mad hatter of a hater's world. – Amy Wynne Whatley

Now as a man is like this or like that,
according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be;
a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;
he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;

And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does,
that he will reap.
—Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 7th Century BC 

A-Z Challenge. I is for Intuition.

"A healthy woman is much like a wolf - strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, intuitive and loyal. Yet separation from her wildish nature causes a woman to become meager, anxious, and fearful.

With the wild nature as ally and teacher, we see not through two eyes only, but through the many eyes of intuition. With intuition we are like the starry night, we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes. The wild nature carries the medicine for all things.

She carries stories, dreams, words and songs. She carries everything a woman needs to be and know. She is the essence of the female soul...

Where can you find her? She walks in the deserts, cities, woods, oceans, and in the mountain of solitude. She lives in women everywhere; in castles with queens, in the boardrooms, in the penthouse, and on the night bus to Brownsville.

Whether you are possessed of a simple heart or the ambitious, whether you are trying to make it to the top or just make it through tomorrow, the wild nature belongs to you.

She lives in a faraway place that breaks through to our world. She lives in the past and is summoned by us. She is in the present. She is in the future and walks backward in time to find us now.

Without us, Wild Woman dies. Without Wild Woman, we die. Para Vida, for true life, both must live."

- Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves.

And we cannot be tamed or domesticated. It would destroy us.

A-Z Challenge: G is for 'Government'.

To attack the 'government' per se and blame it for all our ills is like sticking a Band-aid on a giant festering abscess.  - Yours Truly

A-Z Clallenge. F is for Forgiving.

"Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future."
 - Lewis B. Smedes

This includes forgiving yourself.

A-Z Challenge: C is for Culture

What is culture? Is culture dead? Or is it just running on autopilot in chaotic traffic on a busy highway immersed in a plethora of signage which no one reads or cares?

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”  ― Alan Wilson Watts

“The decay and disintegration of this culture is astonishingly amusing if you are emotionally detached from it. I have always viewed it from a safe distance, knowing I don't belong; it doesn't include me, and it never has. no matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.”  ― George Carlin

“While much psychology emphasizes the familial causes of angst in humans, the cultural component carries as much weight, for culture is the family of the family. If the family of the family has various sicknesses, then all families within that culture will have to struggle with the same malaises. There is a saying cultura cura, culture cures. If the culture is a healer, the families learn how to heal; they will struggle less, be more reparative, far less wounding, far more graceful and loving. In a culture where the predator rules, all new life needing to be born, all old life needing to be gone, is unable to move and the soul-lives of its citizenry are frozen with both fear and spiritual famine.”- Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Culture, cultura, is the cultivation of an integrated system of learned behavior patterns which are characteristic of the members of a society and which are not a result of biological inheritance. It is our ideas, beliefs, our morals and our self-identity as a collection of individuals. It is a collective 'Us.' And a collective 'Them'. It was once the fabric of our civilization. Now it is becoming our collapse. 

Perhaps our redemption lies in the following words:

“What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life." 
-  Octavio Paz  (Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, 1914-1998)

“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.” - See more at: http://www.endalldisease.com/73-mindblowing-terence-mckenna-quotes/#sthash.bPR5UuXg.dpuf

“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.”
– Terence McKenna - See more at: http://www.endalldisease.com/73-mindblowing-terence-mckenna-quotes/#sthash.bPR5UuXg.dpuf

“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.”
– Terence McKenna

“Personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place.”
– Terence McKenna
- See more at: http://www.endalldisease.com/73-mindblowing-terence-mckenna-quotes/#sthash.bPR5UuXg.dp

Truth and Consequences

The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.
- Herbert Agar

Loving Warriors We Are

"Some people mistake being loving for being a sap. Quite the contrary, the most loving people are often the most fierce and the most acutely armed for battle... for they care about preserving and protecting poetry, symphonic song, ideas, the elements, creatures, inventions, hopes and dreams, dances and holiness... those goodly endeavors that cannot be allowed to perish from this earth, else humanity itself would perish..."
- Clarissa Pinkola Estés, from The Dangerous Old Woman