Author: Meng-hu

A recent entry here proposed that the modern Western malaise that culminated in existentialism was caused not by science and rationalism or a loss of religious faith — although these had their places — but by the challenge of a plethora of cultural ideas and beliefs impacting the Western point of view, overthrowing certainty in its monolithic self-confidence, even arrogance, the extensions of Western personality and culture. This encounter with cultures and ideas was not acquired benignly but through the waves of imperialism that have engulfed the West for a thousand years. But the cumulative force of this history is now highlighted by the technocratic state and the apex of modern societal and psychological fragmentation. Thus the Western world has been in a state of search for a system of beliefs or values in which it can believe, adhere to, find truth in.

Such an era is not completely unique to Western history. The apex and decline of the Roman Empire reflects a similar array of encounters with many cultures and belief systems, and finding the dissemination of information about them reaching all points of the dominant Roman society impossible to stop. For despite its civic creed of tolerance and open mindedness, the Western world has always been loathe to accommodate what it considered foreign influence, as in the coming of Arabic philosophy, or Renaissance humanist dilettantism, or the simmering wars of the Protestant reform when they engaged the Eastern European front, or the suppression of peasants for concentrated wealth in aristocracy, or the promotion of rapine technology.

The Roman era conveniently predates Christianity, as the latter is often viewed as the sole ethical wellspring in the West. In Rome, the argument of church and state is not relevant. The material and social conditions of Rome served both to extend Roman influence around the known world but also to introduce those elements of culture into the body of its culture and society that would be inimical and ultimately fatal.

The empire found that its original trajectory was to expand with the intention of conquest, not assimilation or cultural taint. But this was futile, for as expansion reached its limits of energy, exhaustion would — as in Spengler’s biological or morphological model — weaken it, make it susceptible to illness, ultimately sicken and kill the body. Similarly, modern Western powers, formally “post-imperial” today but only in name, have failed to maintain their self-claimed pristine motives, and now find their hubris haunting them with the specter of their crimes returning in the form of immigration, multiculturalism, financial crisis, environmental destruction, simmering social discontent, and the dissolution of optimism, culture, and faith.

The confidence of early Roman conquest was paralleled by the confidence of the European crusades and the era of discovery and occupation — and by the same built-in ethical contradictions. These contradictions eventually led to moral decadence in the home culture — and continue to do so. The ethical contradiction and inevitable abuses of imperial policy infected Western imperial cultures, demonstrating how the cultures could not sustain their historical faiths and their cultural self-confidence. A variety of tricks, deceptions, and economic and military ruses, of vast spectacles of sports, film, fashion, jingoism, Internet — bread and circuses — will continue to try to postpone the inevitable, will continue to give spurts of energy to the ancien regimes. But the course of transformation and mortality will continue, the resulting future being unpredictable.

In the era of ancient Rome, Gnosticism emerged as a syncretic philosophy, the intellectuals’ reconciliation of religion, philosophy, and cultural mood. Unlike the religions of the era that held tenaciously to a system of hope and optimism, usually in a redemption from the political and exploitative systems of the day, Gnosticism held no illusions about the inevitability of such structures. Gnosticism instead pointed the individual inward, to the heart, the soul, the mind. It urged a disengagement from a preoccupation with worldliness to a inner development of self. The external was not to be a deliverance; disengagement was the only route to wisdom.

The contention of the many faiths, from Greek, Egyptian, Persian, Babylonian, Jewish, Christian, etc., only demonstrated to Gnostics that all these adherents were futilely seeking answers within their own given cultures. But each culture was already under attack from the flow of knowledge about other cultures. None could rest when they learned about the views and practices of others. Their reaction was a blind backlash or, in a few, a reflective syncretism. Not ostrich-like do we hide from the existence of other cultures, but we realize that they are the experience of different environments, different habitats, different social structures evolved to handle a specific niche. Hence the natural world can teach us as much as any culture can, the nature is is supra-cultural and contains within itself a larger epistemology.

But the niches of culture, like the niches of the natural world, are becoming extinct. The societal habitats are spoiled, broken, collapsing. This is not evolution so much as devolution. Cultures and beliefs, even historical ones, have exhausted themselves attacking and being transformed, transformed even beyond the recognition of its adherents just a few decades before, let alone centuries. As with the material and natural world, so the human world of societies, cultures, technologies.

What is left in modern times is analogous to the Roman era, for not only has the dominant power lost its moral justification but it has destroyed the rest of the world as much as possible, wittingly or otherwise, and in the process mortally undermined its own values and culture. The imperial West enriched itself by consuming its own material resources and those of the cultures it encountered. It proselytized its religion of faith and ideology, supplanting the traditions of those it encountered with the fast materialism of its modern technological civilization. Now there is little difference between states, cultures, traditions, habits, or patterns of behavior around the world. All are imitative of what the West has become.

A syncretism of classics and the thought of sages alone can be a model of personal behavior. There is no way forward, only back, in this limited sense. Nor can there be any more progress, only devolution. And for the solitary, who observes the whirlwind of disillusion and change that is the modern world, there is no way towards ethical engagement, only disengagement.

TRANSCENDENCE

The problem with Norman Rosenthal’s book Transcendence (2011) is that at its heart the book is not about transcendence but about Transcendental Meditation — (TM) or ™ — which term is officially presented with a trademark sign as the copyrighted product of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917-2008). Confusion between a common term for what has existed for thousands of years and what has been copyrighted was probably deliberate.

Not only does Rosenthal only discuss the health benefits of TM — much of the research coming from faculty at Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa — but in keeping with the copyright, he refuses to talk about actual techniques. These cost money and will not be revealed. The only real concession is in reprinting a chart of comparative meditation traditions and their effects on EEG frequency bands of the brain’s pre-frontal lobe. The chart proposes that there are basically three meditation methods: focused attention, open monitoring, and automatic self-transcending. The chart is from an article in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. Rosenthal doesn’t mention that it, too, is a journal of Maharishi University.

Brief treatment in the text and this chart, then, are the extent of discussion on comparative methods. Focused attention means focus on an object or mantra, and open monitoring is the absence of a specific object of attention, the latter essentially including all Eastern methods. But, contends Rosenthal, only TM (TM) is constructed so that the meditator immediately sees gains in physical and mental health, sometimes almost immediately. Furthermore, use of the secret mantra given to the meditator once enrolled in the TM program, is not considered focused attention because by its very meaning-free nature and use, the techniques lead to automatically falling away at the right time and yielding transcendence. The term used is “automatic self-transcending.” No other technique can do this, Rosenthal (and the entire copyrighted organization) content.

Rosenthal does not discuss transcendence outside of the usual description of feeling good, and the more technical-sounding brain wave coherence. Anywhere on TM websites, focus, creativity, health, equanimity, and happiness are the guaranteed results. But such a technique, if it gives such results to virtually anyone who takes them up, ought to be freely available, shared, based on a few books, self-taught, and practiced in the privacy of one’s room. At little or no cost, the secular and health-minded person, persuaded by an MD, can go back to Herbert Benson’s classic The Relaxation Response (1975) and its successors. For anyone else remotely philosophically, religiously or spiritually-minded, their tradition already has numerous classics. And at little or no cost.

WISDOM

Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe, authors of the book Practical Wisdom, which is subtitled “The Right Way to Do the Right Thing,” are said by the author to consult widely and make presentations at business conferences. Such news immediately sets a pragmatic and even conformist tone to the effort to present practical wisdom as anything more than finding a distilled consensus on how to soldier on with the existing order of institutions, social conventions, and ethics.

Early on, the book presents the idea of practical wisdom as originating in Aristotle’s realism, that humans must manage that into which they have been thrown, and devise a situational ethics to cope. One may speculate whether this had to do with Aristotle’s worldly responsibility of teaching an emperor (Marcus Aurelius is experienced from the other side of responsibility). Practical wisdom can be interpreted as how to deal with the devil, or as how to get out of worldliness, as one sees fit from a higher plane of philosophical thinking. One of the perennial weaknesses of trying to apply situation ethics to broader ontology is represented by talking about wisdom and ignoring the vast tradition of wisdom literature.

Granted that wisdom means a perspective, a self-understanding, a basic functionalism. But no worldly example will ever demonstrate how the asymptote of wisdom will be achieved in any given situation that is not defined as black and white, like a court decision or a military victory — and even then.

Early chapters in the book present the dilemmas of the teacher and the doctor. The teacher is frustrated because she wants only to teach; the doctor is frustrated because he only wants to heal. But nowhere are the more essential questions raised — do we need doctors in order to heal? Do we need teachers in order to learn? Perhaps the allopathic system and the educational system, perhaps the entire economic and social paradigm, the way we eat, buy, believe, create, communicate, love, hate — are all to be questioned first, before we have a set of solutions ready-made. Practical wisdom is not an accommodation but a transcendence. Perhaps the right way to do the right thing is to not discard the way but the things, to let the things organically find the Way (whatever that means to our better self) again, out of the complexity and bureaucracy and atrophied assumptions of the modern technological world.

DAWN
Bright morning glory
heart of a flower spirit
appearing at dawn.

MID-DAY
Bright morning glory,
we will not last very long.
But, now, together …

BIRDS AT MIDDAY
Bright morning glory
we two cannot fly away
when the cold winds blow.

DUSK
Bright morning glory
night approaches, you wither.
Someday, too, will I.

DAWN AGAIN
Bright morning glory
birds in trees sing … and sing.
They don’t know that you are gone.

The first dilemma in the process of developing the mental, spiritual, psychological, or philosophical self is that society presents a plethora of sects, schools, philosophies, and traditions before us. A few hundred years ago, or far less in certain places, we would not have knowledge of the existence of so many traditions and schools. Their discovery has paralleled Western expansion, usually inimical contact with indigenous or traditional cultures, and usually relations based on power and exploitation. When the contact was positive, a handful of ambitious and often ignorant or naive scholars spun away the political and economic context of discovery to bring to light translations and theories about the discovered peoples, cultures, and ideas.

The validity of the religions and beliefs was tested by Western standards, and placed into categories of dismissiveness, condescension, curiosity, or exoticism. Furthermore, the translation of ideas and beliefs was hampered by language and culture, where no exact equivalents could be overlaid onto Western categories. The inevitable Westernized versions, due to the organic character of tradition and culture, so interdependent on environment, nature, and time, nevertheless offers piquant alternatives to the shortcomings of Western thought. Except that there are so many possibilities.

The many schools and sects are now like the varied fare of a bazaar, with the notion that more than a few are actively promoted and popularized, that is, hocked. Western mutations and versions promise an integration of our modern insights with the traditions borrowed or discovered from exotic settings. The anomalous collector, the strange urban figure of fin de siecle capitals of Europe and America — Paris, London, Vienna, New York, broad-minded wanderers of thought among peddlers of antiquities — has become the seeker, the pundit, the seminar and retreat attendee.

The market should be, after all, be a market of ideas, not antiques, not reliquaries. The ideas are similar to one another in their antiquity, exoticism, or piquancy. The favored guru of this or that niche is the strange beast on loan to the zoo, that prison where all exotics go to die.

But even detached from gurus, ideas form no complete pattern, and remain a hodgepodge. Today, ideas are like plants in a hot house growing in sterile soil and separate little pots, thriving only because of amendments and artificial additives. Such a presentation of ideas is bound to frustrate the honest seeker, and one may say that the whole philosophy of existentialism arose because a world full of ideas without culture, context, rootedness, or being, of ideas failing to thrive in the environments of modernity, left the Western observer disturbed and melancholic. This sentiment in itself, this looking at the world as a clot of artificial forms, represents an apogee, a decline, an end. The apogee of ancient empires was always this marketplace of ideas to accompany exotic new foods, spices, trinkets, books, clothes, music, ideas. Anything from afar, while the soil beneath our feet was paved over, and the trees and flowers plundered. Zarathustra quit the marketplace because no one would listen. They were too taken up with the shopping, alternately enthralled and jaded, enthralled by new scenarios, plausibility, practices, but wearied by and despairing of ever making sense of them.

We cannot make sense of what is yanked from its soil, its environment, its natural habitat. Or, rather, we cannot understand and appreciate fully what the thing is. Basho showed wonder at a flower, but Tennyson would “pluck” the same flower from the “crannied wall” and study the dead thing under a microscope. Every idea we import remains dead because we do not see it in the type of society and natural setting in which it thrived.

And modern people are reluctant to change their own natural setting in order to “grow” these exotic plants, because then they would lose their last connection to the modern industrial, technological world that is collapsing around them. Compromises are inevitably made, if only for an appreciation, a hothouse view, a gallery setting in which we go through re-creations of thought and movement and practice, hoping to capture the essence of what came to us from a far-off land and culture. That done, we turn on our appliances, boot up our connectivity to the world, get ready to work another day in the caverns of modern society’s workplaces.

We juggle many masks in order to cope with what we don’t really like to do, and daydream of a world that grew the flowers of that far away ancient land (geographically or psychologically) we know so little of.

The last entry described socialization in the Western world with a simple formula:

doctrine --> practice --> values

meaning that socialization into a specific doctrine, whether religious or not, is the first expectation of a successful society or culture, followed by the practice of the doctrine as evidence of successful membership in the given society and culture, followed by a routinized adherence or belief in the aforesaid process.

The goal of such a sequence is to assure social stability and order, a prerequisite to authority and control. This stability appeals to the individual’s instincts for survival and preservation, and provides the ecological habitat for reproduction, both physical and of the values of the existing order. The individual literally gives up all pretense to wisdom in order to make a gift of self to the contrivance that dominates daily life for all. At any rate, such wisdom is bound by the deeper values of instinctual preservation and order.

This is not to say that the individual should be contrarian or rebellious, or a dissident or nihilist in order to strike out upon a path that is the obverse atomism and fragmentary individualism. After all, these, too, are manifestations of the West, usually at the end of a given cycle of growth and maturation, when smart people decide to save themselves from the coming tightening of social order and authority by assuming that they are autonomous.

Without a serious revision of the paradigm of order, the obverse of disorder, chaos, nihilism, destruction, becomes the only available alternative. Of course, the powers that control society understand this psychology and are always prepared ahead of time for such contingencies. Those who seek power know one another. The activist opponent if a seeker of power.

The opposite of the socialization process above will not transpire in a short period of time, nor can any individual or group force this change upon society at large. Any individual is inevitably a product of that very process, and thus will succumb to the methods that combat it. But the true opposite is not combat, not disorder, not resentment, not counter-engagement. The true opposite is wisdom.

If the existing socialization model appeals to our instincts, disengagement appeals to wisdom. If the preservation of order, comfort, and control typifies both the agents of power and the comfortable citizens and believers, then the true opposite is disengagement, such that order, comfort, and control fall away, irrelevant to the path upon which we embark. That path is solitary, but not one of alienation, for one cannot be alienated from something unless one is engaged with it, if one desires and strives to belong, to attain success within that something. Wisdom lets all of these “worldly” aspirations fall away, including the very success of our venture.

In short, the solitary inverts the paradigm of society and socialization to:

values --> practice --> doctrine

The word “value” carries an antiquarian scent, a nostalgia not appropriate to the sophisticated modern world. But the concept of values is very much applied in the modern world, except that the modern world does not recognize its attachments, its style, its cravings, its narcissism, its contrivances, as expressions of its values. Values ought to mean, or connote, simply that which is considered valuable and not to be discarded lightly. There is a considerable body of doctrine and practices that the modern world is loathe to discard, having spent centuries building it up, though it no longer knows why. So one can take the dictionary meaning of values, the etymological sense of values as what is worthy, what is strong, and find the term still useful in describing what people do. Even those who dislike the word do so with their new set of values.

Modern theories of socialization defer true decision-making to adolescence, seeing childhood in terms of imprint and modeling. In adolescence, supposedly, we confirm our values. This theory downgrades the role of imprint and modeling in forming unconscious values. Adolescence is a time for the very rebellion alluded to above with regards to values, or the time for an emotional attachment to earlier experiences that is not entirely reasonable. But the age of peers, fashion, conformity, and psychological turmoil hardly represent the strength and solidity that the concept of values represents. Rather, it is to take an emotional sense of doctrine and elevate it to something that youth considers permanent, a fragile reliability.

To truly account for values, one must go to the most independent and mature sources, and these are to be found in the historical hermits and solitaries. These simply made their lives expressions of values such as humility, simplicity, and disengagement from worldly pursuits. They made a practice of these values and saw emerging from this pattern of their lives (and the patterns of nature) a doctrine by which to live.

The troubles that humanity visits upon itself and the earth are enough to engender the greatest skepticism about the potential for human beings to change.

A shift in consciousness is often proposed or detected or hoped for, but what is it?

Consciousness is simply awareness, especially awareness of awareness, the ability to reflect on our cognition, perception, experience, thought, and feelings. On a social scale, however, a shift in consciousness is an abstracted process that, in a vacuum, would presumably take place across social and cultural structures. Historically, such shifts are shifts in belief, a dogged embrace among masses of something new, or a resignation to the inevitability of a social or cultural change — a conquest, not usually for the better, from the point of view of the conquered.

But in order for humanity to stop the troubles, there must be not merely a shift in perception or even belief or structures, but a shift in values. This is why revolutions improve things only a little. The cycle of history turns between wide autonomy to narrow control and back again, inverting the hour-glass at some point before one end is full or empty. Or the pendulum swinging back and forth (another metaphor). Metaphors are too absolute, of course, because society and structures do change, but they do not stop changing, even as they pass through periods of flux, tighten control, exhaust themselves, ossify, collapse. They transform, mutate, readapt, and continue — or are replaced by a near clone. They cannot change completely because they are human, after all.

Societies and structures do not change fundamentally not because they are human but because they carry within themselves something vital to human beings such that no matter how inefficient, dysfunctional, or repressive, they safeguard a vital continuity for people. They constitute a social and cultural habitat that took centuries to evolve in relation to the material setting, and equally centuries for humans to adapt themselves to them, to eke out a sustainable way of living and coexisting with others.

But where these processes might seem to unfold mechanically as if the processes are entirely dependent on human will or instinct, or other human-made factors — and not all observers would attribute change to human-made factors — the resultant society cannot carve out an ideal without recourse to a period of devolving into a martial state, a feudal economy, an authoritarian culture of control mixed with autonomy for pursuit of that which does not matter or what does not affect centralization and control. The result is a rationalization of the animal instinct of violence.

Civilizations are uncontrolled human projections, not driven by bare instincts for survival and reproduction but nevertheless controlled by those in power, projected in directions that mitigate reason and exacerbate dependence on the centers of control. Eventually the instinctive drives inherited by humans from other animals are transmuted into “values.”

The resulting political, economic, and social character of the culture becomes its own self-sustaining values. At that point, values justify the tendencies of the society and culture into which the individual is born, grows, and matures. All those psychological facts of growth in infants (described by everyone from Piaget to Lacan) have little to do with socialization into cultural values. The glee of a baby’s discovery and identification predates culture. In that is the universal, at that point at mere months of age. After that, the natural factors merge with the values of the society (via others) and are less distinguishable. Individual tendencies become personality and character. Values are derived, only slightly modified by the person, but always derived, modified by personality. Belief and faith in the structures that are the person’s habitat are inevitable markers of what one knows as “reality.”

Thus the universal form of socialization can be expressed in this sequence:

     doctrine –> practice –> values

where doctrine represents the culture’s infrastructure and the individual’s experience of predefined reality; practice represents what the individual is supposed to do as a respondent or tribe-member or citizen or believer; and values are the resulting ideology or peculiarly personal set of expressions that the individual has synthesized from the culture.

The next post will argue that the exact opposite sequence must be pursued by the solitary.

According to Aldous Huxley, perennial philosophy (a term coined by Leibniz) “is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and mind.” Here, “divine” is used in the broadest sense and intentionally flexibly.

One of the ironies of perennial philosophy is that compilers of anthologies like Huxley and Tolstoy (in his Calendar of Wisdom). abstract wisdom literature into a consensus that does not appear manifest in a specific culture or society.

Wisdom underlies the myriad things, is the insightfulness of human expression, yet it remains intellectual in expression, the product of thought and reflection, not practice. Culture and society are the organic structures from which ideas and practices emerge as from a micro-climate. Here, small and narrow niches evolve into larger, more complex, and more flexible entities. Within these entities emerge typical individuals — not atoms but people, socialized, interacting, and interdependent. If there are bits of wisdom in the cultures, they are either expressed within daily existence, almost unconsciously, or are consciously identified and cultivated as wise teachings of elders. But these are almost always individuals blessed with insight and the courage to practice, not social or institutional organs.

Elders have no stake in instincts: reproduction, territory, power, followers, aggrandizement of self, wealth. These re products of action and growth, not reflection and practice. Elders have historically become the reservoirs of a culture’s wisdom because of their disengagement from instincts. Today, however, there are many foolish old people, few elders.

Perennial philosophy is the summation by elders scanning the settings of their lives and times. Perennial philosophy represents an abstraction insofar as it represents not the culture or even the wisdom of the culture (with few exceptions), but rather the cumulative observation of one person at a time.

Even the term perennial suggests a biological rather than philosophical model. The perennial herb or flower seems to remember its experience, to apply it anew when it is reborn from seed. Its reappearance must have seemed to primitives a miracle, carrying both memory and vitality, the content of wisdom plus the gift of life. Naturally, perennial philosophy outlasts its own cultures, which eventually die, but carries the memory of what it learned, what made most sense, what was wise, and brings it back to life in those who discover it.

No wonder ancients dabbled in transmigration and reincarnation as a means to explain the continuity of wisdom in human beings. Otherwise, cultures and societies are doomed to repeat the same errors, to be dominated by the same base instincts, to commit the same follies. And so they do. Perennial can refer to rebirth as much as to that Jungian pool of unconscious wisdom from which only a few cup their hands to drink, a pool inaccessible to what we call culture and society at large and reserved only to the individual mind and heart.

But the poignancy of life is perhaps not the varieties of the perennial but the tragedy of the mundane, of the “annual” in contrast to the “perennial” — to continue the metaphor. The herb or flower grows in due season, subject to natural forces as it strive toward reproduction, to make of its very cells and atoms something that will continue, something that will be everlasting in its successions. It gives fruit or pod with a thousand seeds, hoping, as it were, to have these fall to the earth and carry on the memory, the identity, that it is.

We call these natural forces blind and random. Science categorizes them in terms of genetics and hormones and vital minerals. But this scrutiny without reflection misses the drama and the potency of meaning and analogy. A lesson not heard or heeded. For even as we imbibe, nurture, give life to the seeds of wisdom (reflecting on the anthologies of perennial philosophy that is culture writ large), we transmute these spiritual seeds from the biological, from that form that the world thinks is the only form of seed and perpetuation of life.

By our identification with the perennial (and identification falls short of love, that love that is the eros of all life, even of herbs and flowers, of human beings), we leave behind the blind and random drama of appearances and enter the only way to respond to the world of cultural and social vagaries.

On the one hand are the cold minds that see nothing of this life drama but their own material comfort, much like the seed that falls on the rock or dry place or on the heavily-trodden path where they are ground down by the march of humanity. On the other are the sentimentalists who uphold tradition and the classics as authorities, but dead. In contrast, the perennial is a living being only when within the mind, expressed outward into a form of living. Huxley warns against “reverential insensibility” and the “stupor of the spirit” that affects both classes of people mentioned. Their methodology amounts to “empirical theology” analogous to astronomy with the naked eye, vaguely descriptive, purporting to describe the indecipherable and the unseeable.

To pursue the perennial philosophy is to throw oneself into life and the primacy of experience, not an abstraction but a path for living. This throwing is not the hot egoism of Dionysius nor the cold ego of Apollo. It is awareness and insight, gained by work and practice. Nor is the perennial a cultural decoration or trophy, like a dusty library of acknowledged titles. The perennial demands experimentation, engagement, and discovery. Only then can wisdom be made into a transforming force.

The ancient Hebrews, ancestors of Western scriptural religions and to the secularized marketplace ethics of the modern West, maintained a two-fold moral and social code: 1) love God, and 2) love neighbor as oneself. Both parts of this code referred to exclusive cultural experiences. God was only their deity. Neighbor was a fellow tribe member. This experience was not exclusive to them but characteristic of every cultural group since — with the possible exception of their conception of God.

For the Hebrews, then, further commandments elaborated on this code. Not killing meant not killing one’s fellow tribe members. Similarly not lying to them or about them, not stealing their possessions or wives, and so forth. People beyond the tribe were subject to a different moral code, and this treatment was reciprocated. Conflict over land, water, and space inevitably demarcated neighbor from enemy. To marry within the tribe and to protect the cultural and presumed physical purity of the progeny was a primitive survival measure. Hence the fate of captive or slave women like Hagar under Abraham, and the fate of their progeny such as Ishmael versus his half-brother Isaac.

None of these facts is new in history but their impact as subconscious psychological and social practices are widely neglected in assessing the evolution of tribe and society into civilization.

Tribally-oriented societies characterized all ancient and indigenous peoples. But even modern societies retain the tension between identity and xenophobia. The cultural beliefs, behaviors, styles, and ethics of those who hold power — political, economic, cultural — are emulated by the society at large. Those within a society holding a different cultural custom are often eager to discard it and embrace the appearance of the powerful. The alternative to assimilation (status of neighbor) is to remain isolated, subject to persecution and attack. Hence, the whole of a society tends toward reasserting its primitive instincts, its unchecked sense of tribalism, even when manufactured for the modern age.

Between this reconstructed social persona and the rest of the world is recreated the ancient tribe versus everyone else. The momentum of popular societies is to remain within the orbit of its primitive and instinctive penchant for consensus and amalgamation. However complex and technological a society, especially modern societies with no conscious cultural foundation, the striving for identity always reasserts itself.

Christianity attempted to discard the tribalism of its predecessor religion in order to rationalize the universality of its theology and accommodate the teachings of its “founder.” But lacking the tribal cohesion of Judaism, the concept of “neighbor” was necessarily derived instead from the secular or pagan world around it, namely, the Greco-Roman social distinction between tribesman as citizen (a political construction) versus barbarians (a cultural and ethnic one as much as political).

To the ancient Greeks, a non-Greek speaker merely uttered sounds of “Bar! Bar!” — hence a barbarian. The Romans, wrestling with the universalism of both empire and institutional religion, assented to incorporating German tribes within its cultural center, but could not amalgamate this stronger if less “civilized” force. Hence, “neighbor” was taken in the Judaic sense for a while, then returned to the hostile military sense of enemy.

The Christian sense of “neighbor” mixes political and coreligionist, not anticipating an equal cultural force in the world. The conversion of Germanic peoples, Celts, and other peoples of Europe evolved a culture that attempted to transcend boundaries but not cultures. The checkered history of “neighbor” in the Christian sense, followed by the secularized Western sense after the Enlightenment, has never adequately transcended its Biblical origin. Unlike Judaism, Christianity was not built on a cultural neutrality but a direct inheritance of what it realized as a flawed view of ethics. Without a culture of its own, however, how could Christian society amend the flaws? Without a radical break envisioned by its historical founder, Christianity carries the millstone of its historical inheritance, undermining the universality it intended. That the West exterminated the indigenous cultures it encountered, whether in druidic Europe or in the shamanistic Americas, or through ongoing colonial wars outside of its continent can be seen as a failure to address the concept of “neighbor” in any cultural and social way different than the ancient Hebrews.

The Western view of the “neighbor” as foreign and menacing to the cohesion and identity of the predominant culture can be described as what modern psychology calls “the Other.” The Other is infinitely different in every way and threatening in that it reflects something at the same time very similar to some part of the unconscious self. The Golem and the Frankenstein monster are projections of the Other, resembling staid society men but fundamentally Other, harboring what is within but seething under bare control within.

And the Other has proven useful for the powerful classes to stir the masses to anxiety and resentment of their plight, ascribed to not their rulers but to the “Other.” What is a primitive survival and territorial instinct metamorphoses into an ideology, the only cohesion left to a dying culture already riddled with its own failing ethics. The “Good Samaritan” of the gospel is not bound by society or culture, but reacts from the heart, violating the codes of his culture by recognizing the fundamental humanity of all “neighbors.” The “Other” does not frighten him as much as does the cold indifference of the majority.

And this is how the “Good Samaritan” himself becomes the “Other.” This is how the distortions of one’s culture and society create the stranger, the alienated, the solitary within their midst. The solitary is sensitive to the contradictions and hypocrisy of the tribe, and to the universal similarities of mind and heart that transcend the baser instincts in any “neighbor.” This is the first step to an understanding of ethics, the universal ethic that one ought not to do to others what oneself would not want done to self.

But historical time cannot achieve a balance that has only existed in the hearts of some. After thousands of years, the prospect for humanity continues to fade. Yet, ironically, the potential for individual insight is as available as ever. As individuals attempt to discern how a universal ethic can be pursued, their path, however, becomes austere, uncomfortable to others, alienating. Tribal comforts are lost; the ready option to hide behind the masks of rapacious society as does everyone else is renounced on principle. The seeking of a path through a social and cultural morass is increasingly a lonely effort. The solitary is at least psychologically more disposed to being stranger in a loveless world.

The link between the life and behavior of a philosopher, thinker, or creative person and that person’s work is often made, even insisted upon. Usually, the link is made to argue that the ideas or beliefs are flawed because of the person’s behavior — or the opposite, that the expression of the person’s life proves the value of the idea.

What an irony — the link works both ways! Whether we condemn or praise the ideas, those ideas are made the responsibility (or genius) of the person. Or, conversely, if we condemn or praise the person’s behavior, that behavior becomes the basis of the ideas.

So we are trapped having to accept both or none — if we insist on a link.

More likely, and more realistically, there is no absolute link because there is no new idea, nor is there any new personality or new behavior.

We skirt the edge of validity in reviewing forms of expression and what a given society will look like socially or technologically based on its values. Appearance involves historical or accidental elements that simply distinguish one era from another, one culture from another. New ideas are not channeled from the dead and morphed upon arrival into some human receptacle that will express the ideas. Rather, old ideas are textured by the atmosphere in which they arrive. Every era is a modernity to the ideas of the past. Through the prism of the moment is applied the myriad factors of what is called “the world.”

But the nuances of expression over time does not mean that there is no link between existence and expression. Ideas are the epiphenomena of mental activity, which is in part a physical and physiological foundation for our thoughts. The mind’s complexity will probably never be unraveled. Why should it be except to control it, meaning to be controlled by others? And that control would itself be on behalf of a particular cultural, societal or political intent.

To “get along” in the modern world, we are resigned to tolerance, which post-modern critic Slavoj Zizeck, among others, labels a Western conceit by which another idea or belief is grudgingly allowed to exist because it is inconvenient to destroy it. Those who tolerate seldom scrutinize their own ideas as valid because they constitute the cultural and social dominance or majority — or imagine that they should be.

When we hear philosophical arguments made today as if they are new, we almost have to filter them through the clouded atmosphere of modern times.

We have little experience of what material conditions affected our best-thinking ancestors. And yet we can identify those trains of thought so well. But how can we ever apply them to better our lives if our identification with modern society is so strong?

This is the prime reason that solitude and silence are essential to our well-being — physical health and mental equanimity. Despite the many relaxation techniques trumpeted today, they have no ancient context, no continuity other than name and form, specifically if we use them only to postpone value-making decisions or to allay stress just enough that we are recovered for the next day’s rat race.

In this roundabout way we can see that the links between behavior and ideas are authentic if we are able to understand the context of the person’s life. Art is a combination of a complex of mental interchanges — among which is simply personality, that tightened bundle of heredity, environment, and life circumstances. But such an understanding is still a tool, not a judgment.

The best art, like the best ideas, are anonymous, and come to us over the centuries as a perennial wisdom, self-effacing and deeply resonant, like a deep still pool of water undisturbed from which any can drink. Such is Jung’s collective unconscious. Such is the tradition of the spirituals who did not write anything, or reputedly did so but probably did not: Buddha, Lao-tzu, Jesus, and the mystics and hermits whose works are now ashes of the great fire once burning. Even the wisdom philosophers who wrote, and wrote a great deal, were only trying to express what they could barely retain.

We can read as much as we can, but without changing our environment and behavior, little will be accomplished. We can identify ourselves with the dead and the past, but until we also understand the tenuous link between behavior and expression, we are apt to make overstatements and to misunderstand the plight of the many ignorant of the modern world. This is why, instead of tolerance, we must practice indifference. Ideas, beliefs, opinions, ideologies, must be objects of indifference to us. We only see the person and the circumstances of their plight, their disposition, whatever animates them, be it poison or nectar, for we only what to understand.

The slender thread that links us to wider reality is more important than anything we think or dream, anything in our environment that impedes us. We must be scrupulous not to obscure our view of it, for understanding is a boon to wisdom. If we merely tolerate, we are consumed with trivial decisions, rankings, hierarchies to construct and maintain, pride to disencumber. Through indifference, we actually remain linked to reality but not bound to its vicissitudes.

The identification of brain waves is well established, but less so the notion of maintaining an optimal range regardless of one’s situation or activities. Modern life and its artificial schedules and routines have already created seasonal affective disorder, diseases of sedentary living and bad nutrition, and the tensions and stresses of technology and society. The modern idea that we are largely dominated by evolutionary instincts and impulses can overshadow expectations that our brain (and our emotions, feelings, outlooks, and behaviors) can reside in a healthy range.

We know that brain waves reflect the brain status of any given moment. For adults, the delta and theta waves are produced during sleep. The awakened state is reflected in alpha waves: relaxed but alert. Beta waves dominate regular waking functions, from interested attention to focus to intensive to stressful.

While beta waves reflect all of the functions of the awakened state, the brain is flexible and can adapt to circumstances, even welcoming optimal circumstances. But one must become conscious of optimal circumstances in order to foster brain health. While there are brain exercises for memory, the “exercises” that will bring us to optimal living are not so easily identified and implemented. They must be cultivated and pursued. This requires learning and reflection, a critical faculty, and an appreciation for natural settings wherein the brain can rest in alpha waves.

In the late 1970’s, biofeedback was the popular method for attempting to affect brain waves. The developer of biofeedback was Les Fehmi, who now calls his system “open-focus attention.” Similarly, the 1975 book Relaxation Response by cardiologist Herbert Benson became a break-through concept to address stress. Since then, Dr. Benson has studied Eastern methods of meditation for clinical input in the search to identify optimal brain flexibility. As Fehmi puts it, “Flexible attention is the sine qua non of health.”

Part of the Western response to technological society’s sources of stress, therefore, has been to find physiological coping mechanisms rather than to address the premises of modern technology and modern socioeconomic conditions, which have been exported to the rest of the world with the same ill results. In part, the conclusion that changes cannot be affected in such deeply-rooted material conditions leads to the search for palliatives. But these palliatives will not work without understanding the conditions, without recognizing that the cause is not addressed if mere palliatives are applied. This is the mistake of modern medicine (curing disease by obliterating symptoms) as much as modern diplomacy (curing what are judged inadequate, backward, or offensive political systems by obliterating them). The premises of modern technological society are not to be questioned.

Into the breach of Western values come various imports of original wisdom, usually broken or made ineffective by the transference from East to West. Most Westerners refuse to countenance Eastern thought because of their own extension of Western colonialist thinking, xenophobia, or inherited bias against what can be called exoticism.

In philosophy, Thoreau and Schopenhauer were notable 19th-century exceptions. In religion and spiritual thinking, Theosophy and Gurdjieff in the early 20th century tried their filtered and eccentric versions of East-West reconciliation. They were predecessors of New Age. Similarly, New Age has drawn on post-World War II physics and ethics to elaborate a cosmology and vision that varies from one source to another but is characterized by wholesale incorporation of Eastern ideas left without their material and cultural roots.

More scientifically-oriented examples include the collaborations of the Dalai Lama with Western scientists (such as Benson) to explore neurological foundations of Buddhist psychology, and the famous 1998 book, Zen and the Brain by neurologist and Zen practitioner James H. Austin, which remains an unrivaled source for bridging techniques of East and West.

The great challenge, then, is how to incorporate into the modern world solutions that will ameliorate the ills of modern society. Solutions will not appear within the modern political and technological realms because they are invested in the perpetuation of the ills. From where, then, will solutions come?

Richard Moss, author of the Mandala of Being, suggests that all human activity is ultimately subjective, both in self and experience of the world, and that our various subjectivities come together to form society. His solution emphasizes the experience of “Now,” which will sound familiar to New Age thinking popularized by, for example, Eckhart Tolle. Richard Moss, who was a physician, has since switched his approach to one of more social conviviality with his “radical aliveness” theme.

Unsuccessful approaches to East-West integration of ideas and techniques is not entirely cerebral. But too many suggest that by a trick of consciousness or sleight of mind or a Buddhism deprived of ethics or social awareness, we can transcend the ills of the world around us. Effectively, the ills of modern life are thereby ignored.

We live in a vacuum of indifference if the Now unsuccessfully becomes a code-word for “Me.” Solitude has little to do with “me” and my own problems or my cultural inheritance and has everything to do with nature and the natural world around us, which includes us. Our brains become fully aware of our world, our environment, by shaping our daily life to practices that naturally aligns us with the “biorhythms” of the universe.