How Did I Get Here Daddy? The Inane Story We Tell Our Children

We live on a blue marble floating in space. Space is the "out there" that you see at night looking up. Those stars are burning rocks just like our sun. Nothing up there really but rocks flying around and crashing into each other making smaller or bigger rocks. We live on one of these rocks that circles that burning rock we call sun. Our rock has water on it.

Millions and billions of years ago living in this water on this rock were little one-celled animals. Just a circular skin of tissue with little chemical activities within. These single celled animals learned to split themselves in two to make more of themselves. They lived in pools of mucky water like this for millions and billions of years before anything else was on this rock we call earth. This was before man, plants and animals.

Eventually, one of these little living cells was born a little different. With some sort of advantage. Like maybe a tail that could help it move around better in the mucky water. Having an advantage over the other cells without a tail it thrived and living better and longer. It split and produced more of these cells with tails. Eventually all the tailed cells edged out the non-tailed cells and took over. Most of the non-tailed cells disappeared forever or just changed in other ways to survive. 

Then one of those tailed cells developed another feature that helped it to live better. Maybe it was a fin that helped give it direction as the tail thrust it forward through the water. This cell with a fin and a tail eventually took over the water environment and the others died off, changed or just remained the same trying to survive.

This happened again and again over millions and billions of years. Before you know it there were all kinds of variations of cells with different feature that helped it to live well and lots of other cells with various features that didn't do so well and died off. The surviving cells got more and more varied and complex. Some developed into multi-celled plants that thrived in the waters and others developed into fish, octopuses and all kinds of animals.

Eventually one of these little multi-celled animals developed legs and it crawled out of the water onto land. It moved about and ate plants and other things that also had made it out of the water onto land. This legged-animal from the sea lived and multiplied and eventually some of them developed their own special features that gave it advantages to survive on the land. Many variations over millions and billions of years developed into all the animals that have ever existed including giraffes, monkeys, grasshoppers, birds and humans. 

Features that helped humans to survive were standing up on two legs and then the use of hands that can  then grab things like rocks and sticks. Also humans had big brains and could think and plan well how to get their food and make things like shelters.

Eventually humans grouped together at certain places on the earth and learned to grow their food and cooperate with each other forming groups of houses sharing the work of growing the food and then sharing the food to eat with everyone in the group. Humans also hunted and killed other animals to eat. 

Humans also discovered with their big brains how to make and control fire. Humans learned to make many other things as well and got better and better at it. 

Many thousands of years later these groups had come and gone. Some grew big, others died away. Time passed and eventually grandma and grandpa came into being in one of these groups. Then your mom and dad came into being also and we had you as a baby and now here you are.

And that's how you came to be here.  

You're a Puppet - the Power of Ideology

Jung said, "People don't have ideas. Ideas have people."

  . . . .

It's very easy to become possessed by elements of your own Being . . . that . . . that you don't have fully under control. And then some of those elements are systems of ideas that . . . that are IN YOU!

That's Dawkins' idea of meme, essentially. But he didn't take it as far as the Psychoanalysts took it. Because a meme . . . a system of ideas that's shared culturally can ... can inhabit you ...like a Being . . . and direct your actions!

That's what happens in the case of ideology. People who have an ideology say, "This is what I believe!" . . . It's like . . . uh NO. . . . No . . . No! ... THAT THING HAS YOU . . . in it's grip! And you're a puppet!

You think, "I think this." It's like . . . no you don't. IT THINKS YOU!

That's what happens. And you know that.

If you look at what happened in Nazi Germany. Everyone wonders, "What the hell happened, man?" What happened there, well . . . everyone got possessed by a set of ideas! . . . Powerful ideas, right? And they . . . Murderous ideas! Genocidal ideas!

And you can't say so much that the Germans had these ideas as you can say that these ideas had the Germans!

And the same thing as the Soviet Union. The same thing with Maoist China. Any time you're under the sway of an idea . . . you're under the sway of an ideology!

Something HAS YOU. 

And it's making you play a part .

And you might ask, well is that a part you want to play? . . . Hard to say. Hard to say what you want.


Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Winnipeg, Canada - July 2018
(12 Rules for Life podcast - Sept, 1, 2019. Emphasis mine.)

Notes from Meditating this Morning

Meditation: looking for manifestations in the body of emotions. The breath itself is a particularly chief manifestation.

The right type of meditation is really a sort of  brain surgery. You are looking for those patterns that flow - catching them in flight - and pondering them to create awareness, to then rewire them.

Pattern flows of emotions, once captured in action, i.e. captured by being aware, causes a separation of the ensuing pattern. That pause in flow, if awareness is maintained with objectivity/equanimity, tends to dissipate the energy of that pattern. Where the energy may have normally wanted to feed a flow of hatred, depression, eagerness, dread, alarm, etc. etc. - it now is caught, like an animal in the night, freezing and then fading into non-existence. If emoted patterns can be captured enough, the established routes of habitually triggered feelings can be altered.

Catching through awareness and equanitmity feeling sensations can retrain how we feel, express, and experience life.

Depression is the expectation of bad - constantly - with no relief foreseen. You aren't just sad or down. You literally expect bad in the future with no hope for good. It is a brain wiring problem.

This morning I awoke, and caught the feeling of expectations of bad going forward with no relief in site. Pausing just enough in my normal feeling routes, I was able to see it objectively - the feeling itself - and where it wanted to go from habitually proceeding down normal flow paths - giving me just enough awareness that it didn't have to ensue that feeling route. Allowing the sadness it was creating - depression itself - to pause in its tracks, just enough, to dissolve, if not completely, but enough that a trickle doesn't grow into a stream. This is the basis of Vipassana treatment as I see and experience any benefit from it. Whether it is sustainable, or able to be practiced enough to permanently alter patterns of feelings built up over a lifetime - that is yet determined.

Maintaining the awareness of sensations/feelings/emotions - of which drive the images and thoughts - is the skill/talent being sought.

This type of meditaion is itself a type of mental/emotional/bodily sensation surgical practice.

Wisdom from Alan Watts

Alan Watts was a British philosopher, a mystic, and an Episcopal priest with master's in theology. He moved to California in the 50's where he started his studies in Asian philosophy where he became the first successful writer and thinker expounding Eastern mysticism. He proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He was a lucid writer and a bold thinker and seeker of wisdom.

I had read several of his books in the 70s, but only now after having been through a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat and now daily practicing mediation while studying it from the angle of neuroscience am I starting to appreciate a few things he discovered for himself and taught in his writings.

Here's some thoughts of his here compiled by Ideapod. I hope you can enjoy and appreciate like I now do.

On Suffering

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

“Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Obviously, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from ‘I’.”

On the Mind

“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”

On the Present Moment

“This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”

“The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.”

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”

“No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”

“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”

“…tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live.”

On the Meaning of Life

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”

On Faith

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”

Words of Wisdom for Aspiring Artists

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”

On Change

“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”

“You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.”

“No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.”

“Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.”

On Love

“Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.”

On You

“What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.”

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”

“But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.”

On Technology

“Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.”

On the Universe

“We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.”

“Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.”

On Problems

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”

Can Christianity Survive on Squishy Post-Modern Ground?

(Another replay from the American Kitchen archives with some interesting considerations of Christianity as finding a place on the continuum between metaphor and literal. Something I was philosophically wrestling with at the time.)

[I read] an interesting article* on magical thinking as being the actual essence of religion... it seems the author is trying to bridge the gap some into the new post-modern era by soliciting a valid form of expression akin to poetry.

He describes a continuum between metaphorical and literal modes of understanding of religion and posits that we all move in our course of maturation from the literal to the metaphorical. In the process morality is maintained or even heightened from the more primitive strictly authoritarian faith-rule.

He describes how the Jews themselves "evolved" along this continuum throughout the Old Testament starting with Deuteronomy (meaning "second law") which was written later to "upgrade" some of the cruder more literal sacrifices and laws. Indeed it was Deuteronomy that declares the number one law is to love rather than to sacrifice.

My favorite section is as follows:

The point is that the semiotic space for such dialectical development has been built into religious language and symbolism, honed and augmented over centuries. To invent a social equivalent of religion out of thin air is akin to inventing a new language--much harder than it looks. So the rational elite may indeed be missing out on something--the "essence" of religion.

My suggestion is that while there is, and has always been, a great difference between the esoteric (metaphorical) and exoteric (literal) modes of religious understanding, there is also a continuum running between them. Many people move along this continuum in the course of their lives, beginning with the debunking of Santa Claus. As they learn the moral interpretations of mythic symbols and stories, they grow to put more emphasis on those interpretations than on the assertion that the stories really happened. Eventually they may come to feel that "God is within," animating their moral judgment and feeling for the world. But in most cases this doesn't prevent them from telling their children about Santa Claus, nor does it impel them to attack the "beliefs" of their less-advanced coreligionists.

Therefore it is wrong to classify everyone based on answers to polling questions about religious "belief." What people say they "believe" doesn't necessarily capture the functional role of the "beliefs," their symbolism and moral perspective. It doesn't tell you where they lie on the magical/moral continuum. So the picture of a tiny enlightened elite and literal-minded masses is also wrong.

All in all this reminds me very much of reading N. T. Wright and his push to be a Christian in the post-modern era by somehow giving up all the literalness of creation, miracles, virgin birth, resurrections and such as "narrative" expressions of the people themselves - not untrue, but not true either.

This rather leaves one on squishy ground, but if indeed we are at a major cultural crossroads in the magnitude of the Middle-ages to Enlightenment crossroads, then there just may be another acceptable mode of expression which can include worship of a creator in the genre of poetry, and story-telling that could be valid but not literal.

N. T. Wright, among other intellectual Christians, tend to suggest this is our future hope for the sustainability of Christianity. I'm inclined to agree.

[*sorry, link is now defunct - Rev. Sanders]

Is God a Metaphor?

(A rather harsh questioning of Christianity that's actually a re-post from American Kitchen on determining if God is better looked at as an anthropomorphism of the Good and how sanity forces to question if having a "personal relationship" with God as a person isn't maybe an illusion.)

.....................................................................

The below was a response I wrote to a friend after he sent me a typical mushy Christian modern parable email claiming that a super-intimate "walk" with God is the highest ideal - which may or may not be the case depending on how you want to look at it.
Feedback from all welcomed on this.

Dear friend,

[this is probably putting more energy into this than deserves … but oh well, here it goes…]

Emotional metaphor upon emotional metaphor….. … another cute story with minuscule interpretation of history playing off a twist of metaphors to give the illusion of a “revelation” --- only to trick the reader into somehow still feeling defeated for what the megalomaniac author claims to have with “there is no substitute for unconditional, intimate relationship with God” and holding out still the “hope” that this is actually possible and advisable to me.

Give me a break.

Well… yes…. First of all let me reply with “Well of course, I also want this great big giant spirit friend who will play the role of my father and who also happens to be the one-and-only original maker of all the universe. He can watch out for me, do things for me, protect me from death, be there for me to cry upon his shoulder; he’ll give me meaning and purpose in life and even magical wish-powers and knowledge of the vast eternal worlds that hold the living and the dead, the future and the past.

And all he wants in return is to be loved whole-heartedly.

For sure, I want to get in on this adoption policy.

How do I sign up and how soon can I meet this giant friendly maker of the universe? And can we be best buddies?

Will I have to sort of pretend? You know, have faith that when I talk he is listening and when I’m sorry he forgives me and when I ask for something and he doesn’t give it to me that he was really watching out for my best interests anyway?

Do I have to get with other people who pretend this same talking-to-the-giant-buddy game, so we can confirm each other that “yep, you’ve had some more evidence, too? Well, so have I. This big spirit buddy really is there and he’s watching over me and you both.”


Do I have to really train my mind with lots of ancient stories and writings that when interpreted personally I can feel like this is how the giant spirit buddy is communicating with me? How can I know when he really is talking to me and it’s not just my imagination or wishful thinking or even my own internal neurotic self at work? Should I just “have faith” and that’ll sort of make it so?

I’m not suggesting that it isn’t possible to “love God with all your heart and soul” ….. if you simply change the word “the God” to “the Good” which is what the metaphor is most likely trying to capture anyway.

This could be doable and I could even understand it as the highest command.

But if I make this concept of “Good” into a giant personal spirit buddy daddy deity who lives in the sky, I find it a little harder to stay in touch with Him and to stay in touch with reality at the same time.

I’m not saying there is no God. I’m saying that your “intimate relationship with God” may actually be a personal relationship with Good.

Yours in Love and Truth,
Reverend Sanders

Many Gods

China has many Gods. MANY Gods!

I went to a Taoist temple in Xiamen, China a few weeks ago. As I'm hiking up behind the temple, where paths cascade through gardens and sacred places of worship, I came upon a small cave that had at least several hundred statuettes of the many Gods in China.

While inquiring to a Chinese co-worker about the various Gods, himself also an admitted Taoist, he told me it's very simple. You have a God for just everything. "If you want success, you pray to the success God. If you want safety, you pray to the safety God."

I'm reading a book on present day Chinese culture and I came across a reference to a "Kitchen" God.

I'm thinking about looking more into these Gods. I like how they are all specialists.

Love,
Reverend Sanders