Morning glory: poems for autumn

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.

Translating ideas

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.

Finding values (II)

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.

Finding values

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.

Perennial philosophy

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.

Tribes & neighbors

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.

Judging

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.

Brain work

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.

Noise

Noise is offensive sound — not offensive in just an aesthetic or ethical sense, but in the direct sense of being human in origin and, therefore, contrived.

Sound is natural, but noise is not. Sounds (which will include the subset of noises) must be filtered intelligently, distinguishing degrees of meaningfulness from deliberate and reprehensible offense.

Noise is made by people and machines, the latter being extensions of people. There are a few natural places left in the world of nature where human-generated sounds are not heard. Such places are rare — one may think of them cynically as the dwelling-places of indigenous peoples not yet conquered by civilization. To some people, silence is antiquarian, something to be hung in a gallery or boxed up in a museum. Noise rules the world. And like technology and globalization, noise cannot be rolled back.

Even in the apparent silence of one’s house or room there is noise: the clicking of a clock, the hum of a refrigerator or fan, even the “sound” of low and high frequencies and microwaves inaudible to our clumsy ears but affecting our health and well-being as we sit surrounded by them. In one’s relative silence, savoring the absence of a world’s presence, comes a deep sigh, the inkling of restfulness and independence, even a constructive meditation or musing. Then a klaxon blares in the street, a neighbor shouts, or an airplne passes overhead. Immediately we are shaken from our reverie and plunged again into the ubiquity of noise, of human sound.

City-dwellers, especially, tend to ignore noise because it is part of the normal soundscape of their daily lives. The modernist composer John Cage went so far as to celebrate city noises as the only form of spontaneous music. By this time, Cage was living in Manhattan as a retired celebrity, oblivious to the lives of the toiling masses in those same noisy streets. Perhaps it was the other way around: music is noise, not noise is music.

City-dwellers’ ears selectively identify certain audible ranges to pay attention to, like animals alert to meaningful sounds because they may signify danger. What used to cause stress to primitive humans was the roar of a lion or howling of a wolf. Today, vehicles rushing at us from everywhere in the street compound stress thousands of times over compared to our ancestors. We think we distinguish meaningful sounds, but these are the dregs of subjectivity. Every noise assaulting us is automatically “meaningful” in a neurological way. Still, we imagine that noises are not dangerous — unless we live in a country at war, where the whine of missiles, and the shouts of groups of men and vehicles in the street represent a perpetual danger.

Most city-dwellers distribute audible ranges into categories of utility, such as conversation, favorite music, cooking sounds, ringtones — versus aircraft, sirens, and shouts. And if urban noises are too distracting, there are always headphones to blot out noise — or to blot out undesirable noise for one’s own version. White noise is the last refuge of the harried urban soul. A whole industry of “nature sounds” exists, but soon to be found on the remainder rank along with other contrived sounds.

A recent study shows that in urbanites the amygdala — the most primitive of our brain structures — reacts to certain stresses that the same organ in rural residents does not. The sounds, in these experiments, were the badgering and disparaging remarks of the clinician testing the reaction of subjects and trying to provoke a pattern on a screen. Maybe other sounds could be tested, but the remarks of others are often all the stress one needs for a day, or a lifetime.

Once we consider all human-generated sound to be noise, we are challenged to defend our very words and our listened-to audio, be it talk or music. Does it stir us to anger, arrogance, passion, curiosity, wistfulness, amusement, resentment, numbness? How does this or that piece of sound contribute to right thinking and feeling, to the development of some virtue or skill? Does it address deep needs? Does talk represent words of discernment, presented in a way that does not bore us or miss the standard of good presentation skill? Is the music merely frustrating our biorhythms, artificially representing excesses of one sort of passion or another, leaving us with earworms for the next few days?

The challenge of only speaking and hearing what reflects our human needs and deepest spiritual aspirations sounds as if the social content of sound — communication — is usually bad, unworthy, useless. But communication of any kind should have not merely a utilitarian purpose, however humane, but a spiritual quality. That is the test of speaking and communicating, for these represent not merely sounds but feelings, beliefs, aspirations, deep sentiments. “Those who talk do not know, those who keep silence know,” to paraphrase Lao-tzu. Communication must have an ethical component, not merely an auditory one. Listening, in turn, should evoke tranquility, insight, perspicacity, harmony, introspection. This should be the touchstone applied to everything auditory.

The solitary is potentially far ahead in the tasks of right listening and hearing, in distinguishing noise and sound. The solitary has the potential to instinctively sense what sound does well or not for the spirit or mind. This sensibility cannot remain at an instinctual level if solitude is to be cultivated. Noise is a human enterprise blotting out nature. This is the first clue to what the solitary must cultivate.

Contrary to modern thinking, a world without noise would not be a cold, lifeless world but a clear and revelatory world, a world in which all natural sounds would be appreciated. Then the whispers of the natural world — already present but barely perceived by most — would become meaningful to us.

The course of things

Why are we uneasy? What is the source of our nervousness? Even of our (Kierkegaard called it) “fear and trembling”? We may think our worry is on behalf of another’s well-being or the success of some long-term project dependent on a series of tenuous decisions. Ultimately, our anxiety is a matter of control, even of power.

We want to control outcomes — outcomes for others, outcomes of our decision-making, outcomes for our life goals. We tell ourselves that the good for all is at stake, that love is our motive, that from love springs our interventions, intentions, fears, prayers, wishes.

But seen from without, even ourselves looking from outside, we know that love and intentions cannot change anything, that our desire for control or power over outcomes is a vanity we entertain for ourselves, telling ourselves that the purity of our intentions justifies our concern. But concern hovers around outcomes which we desire. How will we measure control and success? How will hopes avoid wants and wants be reconciled to the natural course of events?

Or is there a “natural” course of events? The dilemma of predestination and free will is not resolved in our secular world anymore than in the past. We still don’t understand outcomes, what makes for given outcomes. We cannot know all of the contingencies, the panoply of what is called karma in the East or the mind of God in the West. Science maintains that evolution is mindless, random, and chaotic — while pointing to a universal body of physical laws, necessary mathematics, and behavioral explanations of mind. And while we witness the character of human beings over thousands of yers, or over the course of our lives in society and social circumstances. And into such an ontological swirl is to be put the petty insistences of one human being?

The better course is clearly not to insist, hope, desire, or demand. We guide our lives like slow craft, making micro adjustments as the terrain or lapping waves show ahead. Yet there are major adjustments demanded of us — not us demanding of life. These are of diet, disposition, discernment, peace of mind, security. We think that we can stop taking stock of our spiritual and mental resources, make a few amendments as needed — but then go back to the same dependent course.

We may object that such adjustments to the course of life may take a lifetime. And indeed they will. We may never leave our metaphoric port at such a rate. Or we may venture a bit and go back discouraged, afraid, or dejected. But if all the work of preparation is done, or even if we know that the right assembly is progressing, then we will arrive at our destination sufficient to our mind and spirit, sufficient for our self. We will arrive just in time, even as we are found to be in the midst of preparation.