Month: January 2022

Lately I’ve been thinking about non-thought.

It’s not some trick of the brain; a person can actually think of what it is like to not think. Take, for example, your reaction to the color lilac. First, you have to get a picture about what color that is. If you’re like me, you may start with a category: purple. Then you may do some word association with all the various shades of purple you can remember. Words connect with images, images remind you of other pigments in the purple range, and, before you know it, or is it more as you know it, you find your internal awareness awash in a tidal flow that is hardly a simple bifurcation between the color lilac and everything else. And, while I’ll grant you that thought can include images as well as words (an admission which may lead you to wonder if thinking of lilac is actually a good example of non-thinking at all), I hope you will agree that there is something more to the experience of pondering the panoply of hues purple than meets the conscious eye, something richer, deeper, more complex. There may be memories. There may be aspirations. There may be emotions, musings, even transient timeless disconnections with the present ,interlinked with the simple experience of the thought of the word ‘lilac’.

What does it mean to be rationale, really?

Perhaps it’s not surprising that we prefer a conscious experience of precision, of clarity. Of this and that. Of right and wrong. Of on and off. Of black and white. Of you and me. We do, it seems, interact in so many seemingly binary ways. We categorize, often for the sake of making sense of so much complexity. We observe symmetries all around us and hence seek rules that may help us better understand certain fundamental foundations to this wild, weird, and wacky thing we call life. Rules can be nice. They help us structure, distinguish, predict. Such organizational schema enable us to study, observe, learn – and predict some more.

Until I ask myself to think about the color lilac. Because the journey of thinking lilac can lead me, if I let it, into a disorienting swirl of somehow being lilac, almost as if you’ve dropped me like some teardrop of conscious intent into a colossal paint can that softly spins as the essence of lilacness, a swirling hue of acceptance that resembles at first our solar system, then our galaxy, then the cosmos itself, borderless, limitless, and yet so very tangible, so very here, so very –

now.

This morning I read an excerpt online of “Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience”. The topic is the unconscious. The perspectives are the subjective experience of meditation and the observational objectivity of science. Both have insights. Each offers useful frameworks for understanding a world that seems to idle if it routinely run beneath the surface of our awareness. The article is fascinating; I hope to read the entire book. Yet the premise of the article, how it was framed, implied a certain dichotomy between the vantages, a dynamic push-pull tug-of-tension in which, ultimately, we may learn or decide that one side wins. I doubt this is the intention of either the article or the full published conversation. I could not help, however, wondering how, and why, we predictably prefer to refer to the ‘un’conscious as if it so eerie, ethereal, and separate to its intellectual alternatives. The predilection to compartmentalize allows scientific study, to be sure. It helps me remember an occasional few of the myriad of facts about how things work in the complex cosmos around me. Those facts can be applied in tangible if not always productive ways. The results are staggering, in terms of technology and our evolving capability for building, communications, and environmental impact. But do they advance our ability to make decisions about how we live together, how we care for the whole instead of its parts, how we collectively embrace the capacity we have to experience beauty, mystery, and love?

You may know that lilac, the flower, has quite the storied history. To the Celts, it was magical, a trait resulting from its alluring aroma. In Russia, it is thought to bring wisdom, if held over a newborn. It signaled old loves to Victorians and stands for the robust nature of New Hampshire residents. It has held a prominent place in paintings, perfumes, natural health therapies, and ancient Greek mythology. It also has a very short bloom time, flowering briefly, for just a few weeks, in early spring, making it elusive, ephemeral, almost fleeting. I wasn’t thinking of any of these things when I first presented the example of lilac, the color, at the beginning of this essay. I wasn’t thinking of anything at all actually, except that a world of binary existence is a bit like television before color. We called it black-and-white TV back then – as if there were only two shades of contrast available for viewing. How much more dynamic it was though to watch TV when it was first invented. How much better that encounter became when color was added. And how much more we continue to try to expand the experience of viewing life through technologic form factor advancements in virtual reality. Now that is a world truly created by zeros and ones, the language of computer programming. I’ve got nothing against that world; it offers many benefits. It’s only that there is a more complete one, a more holistic one, awaiting me right outside my front door. That world, the one I can step into at any moment, the one that I step through at every moment, doesn’t differentiate between zeros and ones, between consciousness and ‘un’consciousness, between on and off.

It just is.

Some things happen against unusual odds.

I was hiking with my wife two weeks ago, across a path in the high country Arizona desert. It was a nice afternoon, albeit one with a bit of winter’s bite in the air. We enjoy our treks through this land. It is filled with color, texture, big skies, and quiet. In one section of the path, there is a brief traverse of rock and sand that is neither flat nor steep but inclined to the occasional slip of the shoe. On this day, my right foot indeed slipped, only a fraction, and I stumbled, if only partially.

“You stepped on this poor cactus,” my wife noted. She stopped to bolster the tiny plant’s precarious hold on its history. I inspected my shoe. There was no evidence of damage, no protrusion of cactus thorn, no remains of former plant life suggesting anything more than a light brush with nature’s pricklyness. I shared the results of my self-inspection, to which my wife replied: “cactus needles can get through shoes like those pretty easily”.

Her observation was a mix of indirect chiding; I probably had worn the wrong shoes and I definitely needed to pay more attention to where I was going.

“Well, the little fellow seems ok,” I said, refocusing her attention back to the barrel cactus. “And it appears I was lucky.”

She said nothing. This is not always a sign of agreement.

We completed our walk, returned home for a cup of warm tea, and settled into the late afternoon sun. The cactus encounter had left my mind, a state unusually predisposed of late to clutter from too many other sources. Between past and future, there are some days when a hike fails to calm it, when directional movement is insufficient distraction from the vagaries of image, idea, and memory that jump into and out of internal view like excited children repeatedly leaping into a swimming pool on a hot day. In the midst of this mental melee, my right big toe softly signaled for attention, ever so subtly informing me that something was different, awry. Inspection of sock, foot, and toe revealed nothing. My gait felt ok. Yet when sock re-enveloped foot and foot re-nestled within slipper, that tiny call for notice resumed.

You no doubt anticipate where this is heading: the brush with cactus may have had more significance than originally appeared. Indeed, once bright light, glasses, and a magnifying lens were engaged in a detailed re-inspection, a tiny needle was located just beneath the nail of the big toe. Only a few millimeters in length, the broken spine was wedged precisely into the niche separating nail from its bed, its tip protruding just past the end of the nail. A tweezers and light touch extracted the glochid; a soak in hot water soothed the insulted toe and nail. But my amazement grew as my toe forgot about the matter. What were the odds of that happening? I could hike the same trail the rest of my life and that almost impossibly rare sequence of events might never recur. No evidence of cactus spine in sock or shoe. Nothing else anywhere on my foot. Just a single tiny probe of plant defense slipped into a sliver of human anatomic vulnerability. A one in a gazillion event.

Our lives are filled with cause and effect occurrence. Such linked experience is part of the nature of things and the ways things are connected in nature. A push here results in a give there. A pull there may be connected with a release here. We expect that a stumble into a cactus, regardless of the plant’s size, will have thorny consequences. Some minute portion of those encounters will deposit cactus needles in the most unusual of locations. It is like that with life. Run the possibilities for each day in all of their splendor and our experience is littered with rare events, strange and odd incidents, amazing strokes of bad and good luck. Many, even perhaps most, of these oddities are coincidences, “remarkable concurrences of circumstances without apparent causal connection” (from the New Oxford American Dictionary). But must they all be so? Just because something is rare, should it necessarily be seen as random?

I’ve had the good fortune to recently reconnect with someone from years earlier in my life path. This person has had an impressive journey since I last knew him. On the list of his achievements includes a continuous commitment to learning, to thinking, and to reading. His emails remind me of the difference between being widely read and being well read. I used to consider myself widely read; a range of titles and topics has peppered my bookshelves like intellectual trophies. This friend is well read; he understands and recalls the content of some challenging texts. A humble person, he also ascribes to me more cleverness in cognition than I possess. Have I read a certain book? I often cannot recall. He, on the other hand, can summarize the book’s thesis. He has done so sparingly, with gentle humility, for a philosopher or two of some historical repute, in the hopes that I can respond with a insightful rejoinder. Sadly, I’m too busy tripping over cacti, and wondering about the odds of having their spines implanted beneath toenails, to muster the courage to adventure into such worthwhile fields of inquiry.

But our brief electronic communications have opened up a topic which is perhaps informed as much by life listening as it is by complex thought: fate vs. free will. It seems so binary, does it not, the question of whether our stories are told through unfettered individual decisions or in accordance with the the pre-destined plan made by some grand wizard of the cosmos. We should have one or the other, full freedom to chart our paths or the patience to accept the course upon which we find ourselves. I know I should read more on this. I recognize that there are reams of brilliant perspective bound in the compressed pages of published texts and treatises. That legacy, however, is neither presently accessible or of interest for me and my interpretation. Because I believe, based on my experience, that what I do every day is a strange and marvelous blend of fate and free will. All the choices I make are exactly that: choices I make. And I make them all the time. Still, the options often placed before me, the alternatives I seem to have for things large and small, well those do not always seem random or solely influenced by decisions I have previously made. There is more at play in my day than me, my brain, and my agency. There is you, there is the natural world, and there is something beyond you and the natural world that we cannot yet observe or quantify or agree to name yet we still cannot ignore or discount or simply reject.

No, I don’t believe that I was meant to recently trip on a cactus, hours later find one of its swords tucked within a toe, and weeks later share that experience with you as if it were some event of existential import. Nonetheless, here I am, musing on the connections of cactus and book spines, wondering where I end and the world begins, awaiting the arrival of words that somehow produce themselves on this page beneath my eyes through the unusually rare ability of my fingertips to birth the immanent I neither understand, know, or fully control.

What is really natural in our world? What is the nature of wonder in our routine experience? Life is indeed a remarkable concurrence of circumstances and choices. The lack of apparent causal connection does not mean there is none. That uncertainty brings me comfort, and joy.

Yes, it has only been one calendar year. Although the past twelve months may have felt like twelve years, the earth has only completed a single orbit around the sun. In recognition of the continuing ability of interplanetary dynamics to maintain a semblance of cosmic order amidst the chaos of terrestrial life, a top twenty (rather than ten) list of personal reflections is offered below.

1. Put to positive use, human intellect can accomplish much.
2. Put to poor use, human intellect can destabilize a planet and everything that seeks to thrive and survive on that planet.
3. Pandemics require redirection of resources and recommitment to core values. A species blessed with intellect that cannot agree on its core values can find itself in real trouble during a pandemic.
4. There are good people in the world – lots of them. But a few bad actors crooning seductive siren songs can really disrupt those good people’s ability to sing in harmony – routinely.
5. There is too much data in our world and not enough wisdom.
6. It helps to be reminded by people who have died just how precious life is. This year I heard the 1993 urging by former basketball coach and passionate human being Jimmy Valvano to “laugh, think, and cry each day” replayed on sports TV and recited by a religious leader. The surprising alignment of church and state made me laugh, think, and cry.
7. Morning sunshine warms all upturned faces, no matter how cold the night.
8. For all our bragging, we really don’t know very much. Take the basic question of how and why life came to be, or the question of what happens after it ceases to be. We remain clueless in these areas. The nature of things may be for us to be clueless in these areas.
9. A person’s feet gradually reshape themselves over time. What begin as beautiful baby phalanges became gnarled senior roots as someone ages. Shoes with wider toe boxes bring comfort, despite their unflattering appearance.
10. You meet the most amazing people when you volunteer to stand in a stadium parking lot and help thousands of people receive a vaccine. Imagine what the world might be like if we routinely planned such large scale displays of humanity for food, clothing, or other basic needs.
11. Life has an incredible ability to heal.
12. Not all individual life forms heal; many suffer through a healing process only to die. Some simply die. A magnificent flowering vine in my backyard did that last year. So did millions of beautiful human beings and a myriad of other animals, plants, and unique embodiments of spirit. We should grieve all such loss.
13. Grief, like ritual, is vital to life yet woefully misunderstood.
14. The older I become, the less I know. Despite this reality, and in the face of confronting change such as shoes with wider toe boxes, I enjoy aging.
15. Sleep, a hug from a friend, a smile from a stranger, and a kind word from anyone are all under-rated.
16. The present is an elusive concept. Everyone reminds me to live in it yet all do so from outside it.
17. It is invigorating to reconnect with people we have known in previous portions of our lives. It can be enlightening to connect with people we have only recently met. People of both types have real insight and wisdom, especially when they aren’t trying to have insight and wisdom.
18. We need each other. Our planet, and the solar system in which it orbits, need us to need each other.
19. There is more to our world and existence than our intellect can perceive. Humility can bring peace, inspiration, and comfort.
20. Kneeling by my bed each night is an acknowledgement of my individual inadequacy and an expression of my abiding hope. The habit of doing so was perhaps my greatest learning from the year 2021.

May 2022 bring you peace and your own wealth of reflection and learning.